Oh look, another Trump/Musk policy that screws rural Americans
- Thread starter torbee
- Start date
Corporations don’t pay taxes. They collect them.
How much pain to you expect people to endure on the way to your model system?
I’m pretty confident it’ll never work.
Unless a particular procedure is written in your policy that is is specifically not covered, an insurance company makes a decision to approve or deny. You can try to use semantics but it's a losing argument.
You and seminole97 are arguing against insurance of any kind. Pay as you go like food but with no subsidies whatsoever. If you get cancer you need to come up with the pay for treatment up front. It functionally eliminates healthcare treatment for millions and millions of people.
(seminole seems to have forgotten the massive government actions that has enabled our food to be so cheap but that's a different argument)
So all the people who can't afford the care they need go to the ER for treatment. Makes sense. SMFH
Wrong. The decision not to cover a procedure or not can very well lead directly to life or death.
What insurance? I thought people should have to pay for the services they receive rather than relying on insurance to cover what they can't.
Exactly. They’re thinking of cold and sniffles or something.
Our ERs are jammed 24/7 precisely because people can’t pay for health care out of their own pocket.
He’s being hyper technical with his claim that nothing the insurance company says or does or doesn’t do keeps the insured from seeking their own care.
(Except for the funds to pay for that care, which is conveniently ignored.)
Those poor kids. Sorry your dad beat you, here's a pamphlet about pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps.He mentioned once that he works for Bureau of Child Protection so probably insured by his government job. Bit of a Ron Swanson move by him.
Gave in return.
You 'Dowdified' the quote, and completely changed the meaning, unnecessarily.
"I gave the gas station $40 in return for a full tank."
"I gave the gas station $40..."
He gave what he promised, they didn't give what they promised in return. They altered the deal, and opened my eyes to reliance on government promises.
Less overall than they do now.
The current model isn't painless.
"Government cannot relieve from toil. The normal must take care of themselves." - Calvin Coolidge
There's no one on here more disingenuous than you.
I'm confident he "gave" for far more reasons than healthcare. And he was paid a salary for his service. Still, you are the one arguing that he shouldn't have even received that - he should be required to pay for his own health services and if he can't afford it, **** him.
Also, it's notable that you continue to quote Coolidge whose policies (and lack thereof) were huge contributors to the Great Depression. Makes perfect sense.
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Come on. How does the average person pay a $50,000 medical bill?
That's not his concern. It's only about what he gets for himself. If you can't pay for a $50K medical bill don't get in a position to have to pay a $50K medical bill. Or, if you do, suffer the consequences.
First, prices will come down when consumers and competition start driving purchasing decisions.
Second, how often does that happen to the 'average' person?
Do you think the 'average' person is getting $50,000 of medical care each year, while paying much, much less in insurance premiums? They don't, the math simply doesn't support it.
If instead of an insurance model that mandated coverage of every aspect (like having car insurance pay for your general repairs, tires, oil changes and car washes), catastrophic event coverage coupled with being able to annually save the thousands and thousands we pay into the current coverage model would make most people much better off and greatly reduce the amount of GDP we feed into healthcare sector.
There is a reason industry lobbyists are paid to protect the status quo, and it ain't because they have your best interest at heart.
Why do you evade simple questions? How does the average person afford a $50k medical bill? Median savings is something like $6k.
Unplanned medical expenses happen all the time to people. Cancer diagnosis, heart attack, car accident, etc etc. It’s not some rare event.
I ask again - how do people make it through this transition period where you believe prices are coming down to levels where people can pay out of pocket?
Libertarians suck. Worse than MAGA, honestly.
They are the people behind the scenes in the maga party. They are the weird think-tanks that come up with Project 2025, and they are funded by nice people like Koch, Peter Thiel, and whichever other billionaire decided they needed to a foundation of their own. They are the ones really doing the judge shopping. They are absolutely abhorrent.
It's funny, they sort of recruit like a cult too. They hit you up with cool libertarian ideas like legalized marijuana or being antiwar before they hit you up with Ayn Rand and free market dogma.
Approximately 5% of the U.S. population—translating to about 16.5 million people, based on a total population of 331 million—incur medical expenses exceeding $50,000 annually. Within this group, the top 1%—around 3.3 million individuals—have even higher expenditures, averaging over $166,000 per year.
Approximately 10% of the U.S. population—around 33 million people, based on a total population of 331 million—incur medical expenses exceeding $25,000 annually.
It’s almost all “you’re on your own.” Lots of ideas but also too cool to participate in the current process. Just annoying.
It's "you're on your own" until something affects them and then they want help.
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I'm not trying to evade anything. I'm answering your question.
Five years ago my employer was paying $18k/yr for a medical benefit for me, instead of paying me that $18k.
5*18k= $90k.
How many years have you paid $50k in medical expenses? How common do you think that is?
Is it even once every 5 years?
How often do you think the average person incurs $50k annual medical expenses?
We're already paying through the nose, I just want to put the spend in the hands of the individual.
If you're asking me if people can pay for things they'll never be able to afford, my answer is no, they won't.
People borrow to afford things can't pull full freight on immediately.
Plenty of people go into medical debt right now (they even do it to buy expensive things like cars all the time), and people who don't or haven't saved for such incurrences will have that route, but under a model where prices ultimately decline.
So what do you do with that extra $18K/year? Do you buy health insurance? If so, from where and what does it cost?
People borrow for things that have equity that can be used for collateral. What is the collateral a bank would use to secure a healthcare loan?
How does someone negotiate among competitors when they are having a heart attack?
Not old enough to remember when cool left wing ideas like legalized marijuana and being anti-war were a gateway drug to Marx and central planning dogma?
The smart hippies were the ones that realized why the economic system behind the Iron Curtain was a comparative failure to the free market.
Rand fled the Soviet Union to save her life from the people who saw mankind as cogs in a machine they would design, and had a much better understanding of how it actually operated than you do.
According to whom? And who is advocating Marxism?
The smart hippies were not concerned with the economic system, they wanted the war ended and equal rights for everyone. The right wing wanted an end to the hippies and the protests.
Rand was hugely simplistic, characterizing people as self reliant or parasites with little middle ground. She saw altruism as a flaw. No value in relationships or community. She advocated elitism. Her philosophy is based on fiction, not reality.
Beat me to it. We literally found out less than a decade after his presidency what a hands-free economy lead. Prior to that we also saw during the progressive era that pure capitalism leads to hardship also, when companies are allowed to pursue profit over all other concerns. When that happens, consumers suffer.
Conveniently forgetting that our “free market” hasn’t been truly free for well over a century at least.
All monies taken in by corporations come from their customers. If you increase taxes on corporations, they are going to raise their prices to cover those costs.
Yes. But they don’t make a life or death decision.
Corporations pay taxes. Period. Whether they can pass any or all of them onto the consumer depends upon supply and demand elasticity.
And you're wrong.
Do you dispute that a decision by an insurance company can hasten life or death?
No. Not that many of the procedures that are declined are delivered in an emergency setting. Very few.
It doesn't have to be an emergency to go to the ER. You're suggesting that's where people go to get care they need if they can't pay for it.
Think a little more and you may start to see where you've gone completely bonkers on this topic.
Look. Sometimes life sucks. Sometimes a person is hit with a health problem where there are only experimental treatment options, options the insurance company did not even know of when rating.
There have to be limits to what a policy covers (which is a different thing from saying insurance companies aren’t sometimes wrong and even dishonest).
