2020 Presidential Election

[CJD]

(03-04-2020, 06:26 PM)masterpanthera_t Wrote: Maybe he will phase them out over time except for non-emergency / "skip the line" scenarios.


Agreed.

 
I don't see the applicability of this point because ( unless I'm mistaken) Bernie doesn't propose the "all who want it" option. His is an across the board M4A proposal. There's a risk with a new system, yes, but why would it bankrupt an individual? Is Bernie proposing a cap on coverage after which you pay out of pocket personally? And even if that was the case, most private insurance policies have a cap anyway, so why would there be any more risk for individual bankruptcy?


See previous comment. This would not be an issue when Bernie will pay for his system from tax dollars. I am not clear on whether that's possible, but that's the claim in theory. Unless there is some assumption that you want spell out, reading your post at face value leads me to think that existing Medicare should cover a majority of these cases. Probably people who are not yet of retirement age and therefore ineligible for Medicare (I could be wrong about eligibility being 65 or older) might add costs after leaving their private insurance plans. In theory, these costs should be offset by the taxes paid by everyone (including the young and healthy, who will mostly not add much in terms of costs) and by cutting out the administrative cost of middle men. I am not arguing for M4A, but just laying out how it would theoretically address the point you made above.

 
I think my previous comment applies here also.


In theory, there is no more penalty option, because the taxes will be levied on all working folks and proportionate to their income. So while the system will get funded, the young and healthy will still use up a very small portion of it. The older folks who currently use Medicare will hopefully use the new system the same way and add no more significant new costs. ( I'm not sure if these are too simplistic and I'm missing something). This would leave the middle aged folks to be covered with: their own taxes, the largely unused portion of young folks' taxes and savings by cutting out middlemen. In theory.

 
I'm guessing people who don't have income or make enough to be taxed will be funded by the taxes on everyone else into the system. Kinda like welfare and other things. I'll say it again, I'm not advocating for or against M4A, unless the numbers make sense, but that's the theoretical reply. I guess Bernie would say that cutting out insurance companies from most of health care is good enough to get everybody covered nicely and still save the middle class tax payer money while not hindering the economy based on higher taxes on the wealthy. IMO, it remains to be seem if that's true.


Agreed. If this is shown to not work for whatever reason, including properly planned implementation ( even if theoretically sound), I would say the idea will be DOA for longer than 30 years.

I'm comparing M4A to the public option. 

Rereading my comment I can see that my formatting doesn't make that as clear as I thought Haha.