It'll make your blood boil, unless your a lefty

Even a thinking lefty would take pause.

I was on the ACA website today comparing policies. It's enough to give you high blood pressure.

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I compared my county Fl. to a county in Charlotte N.C. I used 32405 and 28105 as zipcodes in case you want to check my work. A family of 4 that makes $100,000+ with a $68,000 Modified Adjust Gross Income gets an ACA subsidy of $33,072. The Bay Co. Fl. family gets a subsidy of $15,192, less than half as much.

On the other hand the cheapest Merklenburg ACA policy is $32,448 a year. wtf! The family gets it free, paid for by the hardworking taxpayers. The next policy is $32,820 again $0 for the family. The 3rd policy costs the family $35 a month, and the hardworking taxpayers, $33,072.

Put up your hand if you want to give a family making $100,000+ a $33,000 welfare check, er, I mean a subsidy.

The cost of ACA policies in Bay Co. Fl. is a little over 1/2 as much as Merklenburg.

Mikek

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Reply to
amdx
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Trying to follow your math examples (or lack thereof)... what's the NET cost to the Bay Co. FL family? ...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
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Reply to
Jim Thompson

Cheapest subsidized policy is $148mo to the family, $1,266 to the hardworking taxpayers.

A policy that is HSA compliant is $190 to the family and also $1,266 to the family.

I didn't give Bay Co. because the shock is in the $33,000 subsidies and policies. Mikek PS, I just had an increase and my non ACA policy is $11,232.

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Reply to
amdx

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At the time Atul Gawande blamed the differences in costs between two rather similar Texan towns on differences in approach - some doctors did more testing which cost more.

More recently there have been criminal charges against some of the medical practices in the more expensive town. The New Yorker's lawyers would have counseled Atul Gawande against suggesting anything like that in a published article.

Merklenburg might be the home of another bunch of criminally greedy doctors.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

Well, not sure tax payers should be paying for it.. oh wait I'm a taxpayer and I'd like to think my hard-erned dollars is going for something good. But it's so wasteful...

The fundamental issue in arguments like this is the cost of health care is about 10x what it should cost. Thanks to greedy bastards that soak up the money and give nothing in return. In the '70's an average surgery was $1K-$3K plus a few hundred for the hospital. Now it's like $50K+. No wonder insurance is so high. Until they kick the board room profiteers out nothing will change and us taxpayers will bear the cost. So don't bitch, your precious capitalism made it that way.

Haha I really shouldn't comment on stuff like this but fuggit.

On a happy note I figured out the AIC3254.. no thanks to incomplete datasheets and bad support. Google-fu won the day.

Reply to
Terry Newton

h.

You're reading this all wrong. The problem is the private insurance industr y. The U.S. needs to move to single-payer Medicare for all. The exact same historical reasons for instituting Medicare, unaffordability and/or unavail ability, now apply to the bulk of the population. Your congressional leader s in Washington don't believe in anything, all they know is lining their po ckets and taking kickbacks. Nothing more needs to be said about the ignoran t and idiotic electorate in Florida beyond looking at the kind of abject sc um you pathetic riffraff send to Congress. Rubio and Wasserman-Schultz- cor rupt and incompetent trash people.

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Reply to
bloggs.fredbloggs.fred

You mean, at bottom, that letting people exchange goods and services at prices they mutually agree on drives up prices?

You'd think, from theory and experience, that that--free enterprise-- controls prices very effectively. People shopping and choosing the best deal from the best supplier(s) keeps prices down.

But we don't have that in medicine.

Google-fu conquers all. :-)

Cheers, James Arthur

Reply to
dagmargoodboat

uch.

try. The U.S. needs to move to single-payer Medicare for all.

You mean we need to replace insurance company third-party payer with a government third-party payer? To save money?

That's silly.

ty and/or unavailability, now apply to the bulk of the population. Your con gressional leaders in Washington don't believe in anything, all they know i s lining their pockets and taking kickbacks.

Congress knowing nothing and caring about nothing is your reason for putting them in charge of the whole shootin' match? To make it cheaper?

That's not adding up, somehow.

n Florida beyond looking at the kind of abject scum you pathetic riffraff s end to Congress. Rubio and Wasserman-Schultz- corrupt and incompetent trash people.

accounts/

Cheers, James Arthur

Reply to
dagmargoodboat

BUT WE DON'T HAVE THAT IN MEDICINE

bingo!!!!!

Reply to
Taxed and Spent

Yes, because private health insurance companies don't _do_ anything - other than manufacturer giant bureaucracies with the sole purpose of having your company's giant bureaucracy be more effective at confusing a person into giving them your money instead of a different one.

Sort of an expression of the Platonic ideal of neoliberal capitalism, to manufacture wealth out of nothing like a magician. Health insurance companies exist to make money, and they make money because they exist.

Reply to
bitrex

Yeah, it's silly to talk about the "efficiency" of the health care system when the whole point of the private insurance industry's existence is to make distribution of health care resources as inefficient as possible.

Reply to
bitrex

My guess is that the level of healthcare that you want for yourself (which is the most important issue, right?) will indeed be cheaper under a single-payer system.

You're cutting out the middleman most of the time, but it's only "single payer" in the sense that nobody will ever turn down your personal cold hard cash if you're willing to give it to them.

Reply to
bitrex

But that is what single payer means. YOU cannot pay for what you want, the single payer will make all payments and only for what services the single payer wants you to have.

Reply to
Taxed and Spent

Heh heh heh, this is America we're talking about dude, I put the chances that even if some kind of single-payer system is ever implemented that Republicans won't jam in a hybrid private option at asymptotically close to 0%.

So "single payer" in quotes

Reply to
bitrex

I think the insurance companies might be afraid of a hybrid system the most, though. If you can't provide a better value than a supposedly totally incompetent pack of non-profit communist nincompoops can, why should _anyone_ give you their money.

They're aware of that too and when push comes to shove they'd probably rather just commit suicide; unfortunately under a hybrid system they'd be allowed to exist and their shareholders might have different ideas.

Reply to
bitrex

I don't disagree that in many circumstances "free enterprise" can do just that.

The problem is that end of the day the noble idea of "free enterprise" is a concept nobody wants.

Do corporations want "free enterprise"? Fuck no! Competition is bad for profits!

Do governments want "free enterprise"? Fuck no! It's really complicated effectively managing all sorts of little companies competing with each other, even if government's sole role is to keep the playing field level. It's way easier to manage a system of monopolies.

Do the people want "free enterprise"? Fuck no! People don't give a shit about the "best deal" on anything that isn't a low-margin subsistence-level consumer good. Otherwise they wanna buy what's hip and cool that speaks to their emotions with a cool company name stuck on it that makes them feel cool and hip!

Reply to
bitrex

If there were legislation submitted tomorrow that declared Apple Inc the sole supplier of consumer electronics to the US for the next 10 years and the price of the most basic phone model would start at $1000 they'd a million letters of support from Americans under 35.

Reply to
bitrex

h

That may not be what's going on here.

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At the time Atul Gawande blamed the differences in costs per head between t wo rather similar Texan towns on differences in approach - some doctors did more testing which did cost more.

More recently there have been criminal charges against some of the medical practices in the more expensive town. The New Yorker's lawyers would have c ounseled Atul Gawande against suggesting anything like that in a published article.

Free enterprise is great in markets where it works. You have to watch the m arkets rather carefully, because people do like setting up monopoly positio ns and cartels and using them to jack up prices and cutting back on the del iverables.

Sadly, when people buy medical services they don't shop around as carefully as they do when shopping for more tangible goods, and can be under pressur e to get cured quickly, before they drop dead.

Obviously not. It doesn't work all that well, and doesn't deal at all with the anti-epidemic aspect of medicine. The US complicates the issue by allow ing doctors to practice professional birth-control, making medical training remarkably long and expensive, which throttles back the supply and allows the medically qualified to charge rather high prices.

There are plenty a better schemes around that the US system, delivering bet ter health care - assessed over the population as a whole - at two thirds o f the cost per head (or less, if you look at the UK system).

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

Nobody actually believes the "free market" works in any kind of pure sense other than weird aspie engineer-nerds who extrapolate the engineering discipline into every area of their life and treat every purchase as some kind of min/max optimization problem, and never once cared about being cool.

Reply to
bitrex

h

It's one explanation of why US medicine is remarkably expensive, while not being universal. James Arthur can't think of any other, despite the fact th at every other advanced industrial country manages to offer universal healt h care at two thirds of the price per head of the US system (or less).

Most of them use some variation of the national insurance scheme originally set up by that arch-socialist Otto van Bismark, and every last one of them has better population-wide health statistics than the US.

James Arthur blames this on American exceptionalism, and he's right to be e xtent that the US is exceptionally dedicated to rejecting any scheme that w orks if there's a risk that anybody could label them socialist.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

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