2020 Presidential Election

[CJD]

(03-04-2020, 01:32 PM)BmorePat87 Wrote: He's basically running on reviving Obamacare and adding a public option that you can buy into. 

While insurance companies may suck, saying that you will get rid of all insurance companies and force people on medicare is very unpopular. It's the most drastic move possible and that does scare people. Bernie has to grasp that reality. It's not just billionaires making people think it.  

I'm not certain whether or not Bernie would actually get rid of insurance companies or just render them obsolete.

I'm pretty sure there'd still be private insurance companies if M4A were passed. They'd probably just be supplement programs to, for example, skip the "line" for non-emergency surgeries and the like.

But regarding the middle man that is sucking money out of the system without providing any meaningful value? Yea, I don't mind them going extinct.

The concern I have with the public option is that the majority of people who currently have insurance through their employer are not necessarily going to go with "Medicare for all who want it" over their private insurance for a variety of reasons, whether that be uncertainty of the new system or just general inertia to the familiar. Why risk a new healthcare system when you have one that you know, at the very least, won't bankrupt you?


If the public option is not taken on, en masse, by working, healthy people who are already getting private insurance through their employer, that would leave the system to only insure the most unhealthy and/or oldest people in the country, who may not have access to insurance any other way.

The way an insurance system works is that the young, healthy and active members spend into the system but don't use it very often (because they are young and healthy) and offset the costs of the older, less healthy people who also pay into it, but use it more often.


I think there's a very high risk that only unhealthy and old people will take the public option, leaving the system extremely bloated (because the premiums being paid in are not offsetting the costs of the healthcare given to the unhealthy and old people) and is, therefore, extremely expensive. As it gets more expensive, premiums and deductibles go up.


It's my understanding that this was essentially what happened to Obamacare, with the system being overloaded with "uninsurable" people who were expensive to cover, but young, relatively healthy people who were previously uninsured often decided to just take the penalty instead, as it was cheaper than having insurance that they didn't think they'd need.


As the public option bloats (with expensive patients and relatively few cheap patients), the more expensive it gets and the less capable it is of competing with private insurers. This ultimately defeats the entire purpose of the proposal.


So how do you convince already insured people/healthy people to buy into a new system, in order to keep the costs balanced?


Plus, there's the most obvious problem with the public option that it doesn't cover people who can't afford insurance. The people who can't afford a monthly premium, or are unwilling to pay one because they think they don't need it, before having a catastrophic injury and going bankrupt.


So there will still be millions of people with no insurance, so was the problem even really solved?


If this were to occur and a public option was instituted and subsequently buckled under its own weight, we'd lose the ability to push for universal healthcare for the next...3 decades at least. Any time you'd bring it up, conservatives (and moderates) would just say "we tried that already in 2020, don't you remember? It failed!"...Again, kind of like what they say about Obamacare now haha.