is this healthcare the way to go?

[Grapesoda]

How Alaska fixed Obamacare

just asking, no opinion myself.

[Rochard]

Some states put a lot of effort into Obamacare. Other states did not.

[Grapesoda]

Originally Posted by Rochard

Some states put a lot of effort into Obamacare. Other states did not.

great non-answer! right there with 'some people like to dance' thanks!

[crockett]

Alaska is it's own special case, that other states can't replicate TBH..

Alaska is pretty much a socialist state with-in the US which is why I used to laugh so hard at Palin when she would go rah rah socialism bad..

In Alaska the people pay zero taxes. Big business pays all the taxes for the entire state. Added to this residents get a check each year for excess tax money (yes they get a tax refund for not paying taxes).. (it used to be over $10k a year but I think it's about $700 these days)

Added to this for every dollar in Federal tax collected in Alaska, they get back something like $2.5 in federal substitutes. It is the biggest welfare state in this country..

Other states likely can't afford to do that because they don't get that kind of federal welfare substitutes vs the size of the population. Also in other states is a reversal where the people pay all the taxes and big business pays very little.

Even Vermont with it's fairly high tax rate and low population couldn't afford to do a single payer health care system on their own and Sanders tried very hard to make it happen.

States simply can't do this on their own, it has to start with the federal govt. If we put the investment into heathcare we could have a single payer system, but instead we have Trump taking 3 million dollar weekly vacations, planning to spend 20- billion for a useless wall and wants to spend who knows how much more on the military and nuclear weapons..

Obamacare was always meant to be a stepping stone to single payer IMO, but with Republicans in control, it's gonna be a dead end and we will end up with an even worse system that is even more costly.. Republicans don't want to fix healthcare, they want to make Obamacare fail so they can say "see we can't afford single payer"..

[Grapesoda]

I was under the impression the Alaska funds were associated with 'oil profits', not welfare. the other stuff about trump etc, no idea. I do not believe anything in the news. I have no idea what trumps doing EXCEPT when he was running, and picked the exon guy, tillson, I was pretty excited, finally a guy that's NOT a FUCKING lawyer, and has an existing relationship with the Russians to chat them up... whoo hoo!!! awe-fucking-some... and he is doing just that.. so I have heard and I have seen, what I need to see.

[Bladewire]

Originally Posted by Grapesoda

.. so I have heard and I have seen, what I need to see.

[AmeliaG]

Seems like all US plans involve making sure the insurance industry still gets corporate welfare. The Alaska plan is basically socialized medicine only for super duper expensive stuff that would cost insurance a lot. If the point of insurance is to mitigate risk, why are people paying for it, when it is only going to cover more typical problems, not outliers?

[pimpmaster9000]

you need to import serbians or cubans to run your healthcare...you are not capable of running it yourselves

[crockett]

Originally Posted by Grapesoda

I was under the impression the Alaska funds were associated with 'oil profits', not welfare. the other stuff about trump etc, no idea. I do not believe anything in the news. I have no idea what trumps doing EXCEPT when he was running, and picked the exon guy, tillson, I was pretty excited, finally a guy that's NOT a FUCKING lawyer, and has an existing relationship with the Russians to chat them up... whoo hoo!!! awe-fucking-some... and he is doing just that.. so I have heard and I have seen, what I need to see.

Yea it is oil profits from the state, but it's still the reason they don't pay any sort of state taxes. Businesses are generating the tax income. Then when you add in all the federal govt subsidies, it's pretty fucked that people are getting money handed to them for nothing while those federal subsidies come from other state's like Cali, New York, Texas ect..

If they have money to hand out to people, they shouldn't be given federal subsidies that is basically tax money from other states.. Any state that gets back more in federal subsidies than it collects = welfare state..

[Yanks_Todd]

The more Obamacare moves left towards a single payer the more stable it would become. I think this is a step in the right (left) direction. Value needs to be extracted from other places and returned to the people to receive more streamlined care. That is the solution.

Interesting read

[Grapesoda]

Originally Posted by AmeliaG

Seems like all US plans involve making sure the insurance industry still gets corporate welfare. The Alaska plan is basically socialized medicine only for super duper expensive stuff that would cost insurance a lot. If the point of insurance is to mitigate risk, why are people paying for it, when it is only going to cover more typical problems, not outliers?

obama care set aside billions to pad the insurance companies... never gets mentioned though

https://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...=.d2042fb6f91d

$2.5 billion for 2014 and an as-yet-undisclosed sum for 2015 — is crucial to the exchanges’ well-being

[Barry-xlovecam]

Medicare for all and a 5% VAT Tax and a 2% financial transactions tax for all including legal persons (Corporations, LLC, etc.) securities, stocks, bonds new loans real and personal taxable to pay for it. Healthcare insurers could offer coverage beyond the mandated minimums. Much as what is done when Medicare is the primary insurer now.

Cost justify medical charges. A lot of costs are a rip-off that yield no tangible results. Hopefully, if managed well, some of these new tax monies could be used for basic medical research and what is learned could lower patient costs and improve outcomes.

The fee per service system need to be looked at ...

The nation is not Alaska. Few people and disproportionate mineral wealth (oil) to pay subsidies.

[MatureKing]

Have you heard about ghosts in Alaska?

[crockett]

Originally Posted by AmeliaG

Seems like all US plans involve making sure the insurance industry still gets corporate welfare. The Alaska plan is basically socialized medicine only for super duper expensive stuff that would cost insurance a lot. If the point of insurance is to mitigate risk, why are people paying for it, when it is only going to cover more typical problems, not outliers?

The problem is insurance has become ingrained in our society. It's not just an issue of say giving the insurance companies a way to make money, but no politician wants to be the guy to put them out of business. The insurance industry employees hundreds of thousands of people and there are tens out thousands of private insurance firms selling policies for these big companies..

If we strait up cut insurance companies out of health care it would be a bigger shock to the economy than the housing crash was. I don't like insurance companies, as I look at them as a useless industry that "shouldn't" exist in healthcare, but the fact is they are here and they are deep rooted into our economy.

edit I just looked it up.. 2.5 million people work in the insurance industry. Of course that covers auto, home & life.. We already know the auto insurance industry will be hit hard in the near future due to autonomous vehicles. Meaning that segment will already be losing lots of jobs in the future.

Single payer is what we should have, but getting there is the tricky part..

[PR_Glen]

Originally Posted by crucifissio

you need to import serbians or cubans to run your healthcare...you are not capable of running it yourselves

population of Serbia is about 7-8 million, population of Cuba is about 11-12 million.

Now the population of Florida alone is about the same as both those combined. Get some perspective on what you are talking about. fixing a healthcare system with gigantic populations is not an easy fix for anyone. You pretending that they are comparable is laughable and down right ignorant.

[Barry-xlovecam]

Healthcare insurance for common workers was started with union contract settlements in the 1960's. Non unionized employers adopted the same type healthcare benefits for their workers to remain competitive to workers.

The problem was that when a third party pays your bill you are not that troubled by the cost. Then the cycle begins -- higher costs and higher insurance premiums.

Even if you made a national heathcare program that was tax supported you would still need to people to administrate it so the economic impact would be limited to the obsoleted insurance industry executives and stake owners -- stockholders and a lot of REIT's owning healthcare facilities.

We could maybe save $500 Billion to $1 trillion a year and control future costs. But American healthcare cost will never be equal to the third world costs cited by many here. These people do not consider the higher US wage rates that would still apply.

"According to indeed.com, the average RN salary in CA, in October 2014, was $71,000. As per the BLS, the mean annual and hourly wages, in May 2013, were $96,980 and $46.62, respectively. Since the cost of living is quite high, the average registered nurse salary in California is 7% higher than the national average."

[Grapesoda]

Originally Posted by crockett

Yea it is oil profits from the state, but it's still the reason they don't pay any sort of state taxes. Businesses are generating the tax income. Then when you add in all the federal govt subsidies, it's pretty fucked that people are getting money handed to them for nothing while those federal subsidies come from other state's like Cali, New York, Texas ect..

If they have money to hand out to people, they shouldn't be given federal subsidies that is basically tax money from other states.. Any state that gets back more in federal subsidies than it collects = welfare state..

yup........

[Paul Markham]

Last year, Alaska?s Obamacare marketplaces seemed on the verge of implosion. Premiums for individual health insurance plans were set to rise 42 percent. State officials worried that they were on the verge of a ?death spiral,? where only the sickest people buy coverage and cause rates to skyrocket year after year.

So the state tried something new and different ? and it worked. Lori Wing-Heier, Alaska?s insurance commissioner, put together a plan that had the state pay back insurers for especially high medical claims submitted to Obamacare plans. This lowered premiums for everyone. In the end, the premium increase was a mere 7 percent.

This isn't solving the problems of the high cost of US Healthcare. It's transferring the cost from Healthcare industry to Citizens, to Healthcare industry to Government to Citizens The Citizens end up paying in te end.

The only solution to the high costs is to get private enterprises noses out of the trough.

[Paul Markham]

Originally Posted by Barry-xlovecam

Even if you made a national heathcare program that was tax supported you would still need to people to administrate it so the economic impact would be limited to the obsoleted insurance industry executives and stake owners -- stockholders and a lot of REIT's owning healthcare facilities.

So why are other countries, none third world, with a government run health service, able to run a cheaper and better service than the US?

[Bladewire]

Originally Posted by Paul Markham

So why are other countries, none third world, with a government run health service, able to run a cheaper and better service than the US?

Oh you're blaming the Jews, how alt-white of you.

[Paul Markham]

Originally Posted by crockett

The problem is insurance has become ingrained in our society. It's not just an issue of say giving the insurance companies a way to make money, but no politician wants to be the guy to put them out of business. The insurance industry employees hundreds of thousands of people and there are tens out thousands of private insurance firms selling policies for these big companies..

If we strait up cut insurance companies out of health care it would be a bigger shock to the economy than the housing crash was. I don't like insurance companies, as I look at them as a useless industry that "shouldn't" exist in healthcare, but the fact is they are here and they are deep rooted into our economy.

edit I just looked it up.. 2.5 million people work in the insurance industry. Of course that covers auto, home & life.. We already know the auto insurance industry will be hit hard in the near future due to autonomous vehicles. Meaning that segment will already be losing lots of jobs in the future.

Single payer is what we should have, but getting there is the tricky part..

America has had no problem sacking millions in other industries to deliver a cheaper product. By introducing a government run Healthcare Industry the lower costs means more people have more money to spend on other products. Isn't that the excuse for lower taxes?

[tony286]

Originally Posted by Barry-xlovecam

Healthcare insurance for common workers was started with union contract settlements in the 1960's. Non unionized employers adopted the same type healthcare benefits for their workers to remain competitive to workers.

"

Actually it started during world war 2 , the kaiser family built ships and finding employees was hard during the war. The first health insurance started then as an employee enticement. What happened in the 60's was medicaid and medicare.

If you changed to medicare for all , it wouldn't end insurance . Medicare for all would give you a base level of care and if you wanted better you would buy supplemental policies. Like it goes now for the elderly.

[tony286]

We decide in this country once and for all, is healthcare is a right or a privilege.
They dance around it but once that is answered clearly the rest will fall into place.

The right seems to think its a privilege and they should have the balls to say it. Instead of dancing around.

[Barry-xlovecam]

No what happened happened and I was there -- I didn't read it in a history book. Medicare and Union contracted medical insurance happened around the sametime exceptions to rules don't mean much in the general context

For a variety of reasons, unions began a push for employer provision and funding of health and other benefits that employers strongly resisted. In an action that was a blow to union control of health plans and a stimulus to employer-controlled programs, the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 banned union control of welfare funds based on employer contributions. On the positive side, an attempt to explicitly exclude employee benefits from the requirement for collective bargaining failed, and the law retained the vague language of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act that required management to bargain on "wages and conditions of employment." The law also established regulations for joint employer-union control of plans involving multiple employers.

Health and welfare benefits were major factors in a wave of postwar strikes and other conflicts with employers over what bargaining on "conditions of employment" involved.16 Key National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) rulings in 1948 clarified the matter. The NLRB held, in a case involving Inland Steel Company and the United Steel Workers, that federal law required employers to bargain over pensions. Shortly after that, the board ruled likewise for health insurance benefits. The Supreme Court upheld the NLRB in 1949. Still, over half the strikes in 1949 and the first part of 1950 were related to health and welfare issues (Weir et al., 1988). During the 1949 steelworkers strike, a fact-finding board appointed by the President firmly supported the union position on bargaining, and the steel companies began to settle.

Health insurance and other fringe benefits were on their way to becoming a standard feature of employment. A number of unions continued to sponsor health centers and other programs, but most focused on the employer-sponsored programs. A further important boost to these programs came in 1954 when the Internal Revenue Code made it clear that employers' contributions for health benefit plans were generally tax deductible as a business expense and were to be excluded from employees' taxable income. Between 1950 and 1965, employer outlays for health care rose from 0.5 to 1.5 percent of total employee compensation.17

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK235989/
Good read if you are really interested in the subject and have the time

Today healthcare is a very costly part of employee compensation. You forgo personal wages in return for the employer paid portion of private insurance -- healthcare insurance benefits are a hidden tax on either profits or wages. It is a line cost item that is not identified and hidden in the economic stew (an oxymoron really). The problem is you cannot constitutionally mandate the healthcare benefit cost to be paid to the employee, then paid by him into a government operated healthcare scheme via a VAT or some other tax.

So in all likelihood, a universal mandated healthcare scheme would free up profits for businesses and increase the common workers' tax burdens. Businesses might be forced by competition to raise salaries to compete for the best employees and in some low end positions have to increase wages to maintain a minimal living standard for lower paid workers.

In layman terms: the minimum wage would need to increase to enable lower paid workers to pay the new taxes required for public universal healthcare. The mid-wage workers would be stuck between a rock and hard spot -- the market would determine their wage and they would have a new paradigm to deal with.

If you read the book, or parts of the 2nd chapter you will see this is an evolving argument of the last century. Rather than realigning the mess we drag our feet with debate and compromise while our society rots from within. The real enemy is ourselves.

Trump promised a TERRIFIC healthcare all citizens could afford. HORSESHIT.


@paul No, medical professionals are not going to take a cut in pay -- that just will not happen for obvious reasons. I don't want a surgeon that feels he is underpaid doing a half-ass job on me because he is late for his part time second job. You want to live in a low wage Eastern European nation that is your business.

[Grapesoda]

Originally Posted by tony286

We decide in this country once and for all, is healthcare is a right or a privilege.
They dance around it but once that is answered clearly the rest will fall into place.

The right seems to think its a privilege and they should have the balls to say it. Instead of dancing around.

do people have the right to children and then force me to pay for them... yes or no?

[Barry-xlovecam]

Go live on a desert island and take care of yourself.
Life ain't fair. Being bitter about it accomplishes absolutely nothing.

[tony286]

Originally Posted by Grapesoda

do people have the right to children and then force me to pay for them... yes or no?

is healthcare is a right or a privilege? That has to be first decided the rest is bullshit. But no righty in gov has the balls to say its a privilege. If the kid with cancer and no coverage dies , he dies.

[Google Expert]

Obama = worst president ever. Why is he not in jail yet?

[Barry-xlovecam]

If healthcare is a "human right" then we all have to collectively pay just as roads and airports are rights also that we pay for in taxes. We pay for those things and we all can use them "free" of most tolls or fees. The money has to come from somewhere ...

[Google Expert]

Originally Posted by crockett

In Alaska the people pay zero taxes.

So do blacks, illegal aliens and leftist degenerates like yourself all over the country.
Scumbag welfare leeches.