It's good to have an insider speak out and expose some of this stuff, but it would also be nice to see a little remorse about the scale of the deception. Instead, I see that they got a book deal. (I haven't read it... maybe remorse is expressed in there.)
Obamacare made it illegal for consumers to shop for health insurance across state lines. Medicare for all eliminates private health insurance, leaving only a single state run monopoly in place. The marketing campaign says obamacare and medicare for all give consumers more options and reduce prices, in reality they do the opposite.
Medicare advantage might work but the regular Medicaid is absolutely horrible.
I know this because I was financially in charge of somebody on Medicaid who had a lot of health needs.
We very much regretted not signing up for Medicare advantage while it was still possible.
And guess what: Medicare advantage is private health insurance companies, while Medicare regular is government.
And no I'm not some hired shill, I tried it I used it, it really and truly is horrible.
The problem is very simple it's the 20% copay and the deductibles. someone with a lot of health needs gets an absolute mountain of extraordinarily complicated bills to have to figure out and pay.
Then trying to figure out what you are and aren't eligible for requires hours of time.
For example hospital stays reset nursing stays and all kinds of complicated rules.
If you have somebody on Medicare see how much mail they get, multi-inch thick booklets come in the mail and they're supposed to read them all and understand them.
It’s too bad neoliberals like Klobuchar and Buttigieg are using republican talking points to scare the left from pursing Medicare for all. Bernie or Warren are the only options. We need to fundamentally change so many aspects of our society and half-measures aren’t going to do anything but protect the broken status quo.
Half measures definitely will not fix the problem. The only way we can make progress on this issue is to fix the problem of transparency on costs, billing, and payments. Right now it's impossible to make any sort of realistic policy proposals because we don't have access to the fundamental data.
One thing that concerns me about "medicare for all" is that from a lot of things I've read hospitals that have too many medicare patients go out of business -- what's really going on?
Also, another key issue we need to address is the fundamental costs; we can perhaps lower the bar needed to administer healthcare -- if the error rate goes up a little but is offset by access and earlier interventions we could big improvements. Right now we are pretending that we have one standard of care and it's high and expensive; but we really have two high or almost nothing. Perhaps theres room for a medium quality of care that is backstop so that no one gets nothing.
> The only way we can make progress on this issue is to fix the problem of transparency on costs, billing, and payments.
Is anyone actually running on this? Otherwise MFA is simple for the end user and superior to "more options" that nobody can afford or HSA that only benefits people who didn't need it.
