ACP45 Loc: Rhode Island

Excerpts from an article entitled "Americans Had To Borrow 88 Billion Dollars To Cover Their Medical Bills Last Year" - Link at bottom
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Fixing our horribly broken health care system needs to be a top national priority, but earlier today Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made it abundantly clear that nothing will be done about Obamacare in the Senate until the 2020 e******n. And of course the Democrats are not going to make any major moves on health care until the 2020 e******n either.

Unfortunately, we are stuck with what we have got for the moment.

Our health care crisis is a national nightmare that never seems to end, and it gets worse with each passing year.

So for now, just hope that nobody in your family becomes seriously ill, because if that happens there is a good chance you might go bankrupt.

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Here are some more numbers that show the current state of the U.S. health care system…

–3.7 trillion dollars was spent on health care in the United States in 2018. That breaks down to $10,739 per person.

-If our health care system was a country, it would have the fifth largest GDP on the entire planet.

–76 percent of Americans believe that they pay too much for the quality of health care that they receive.

-Out of the 36 counties in the OECD, the U.S. ranks 31st in infant mortality.

-Prescription drugs are the fourth leading cause of death in the United States today.

-Pharmaceutical companies spend approximately 30 billion dollars a year to market their drugs to all of us.

–Nearly half of all U.S. doctors are considering leaving the field of medicine, and health insurance companies are the primary reason.

-The median charge for visiting an emergency room in the United States is well over a thousand dollars.

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/americans-had-to-borrow-88-billion-dollars-to-cover-their-medical-bills-last-year

jimpack123 Loc: wisconsin

Oh but Trump is trying to have the courts do away with Obama care with no plan to replace it. Just wait and see what kinda plan they go with if this Moron gets reelected. We must v**e this guy out of the office

ACP45 Loc: Rhode Island

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Not sure if you read the link I posted, but consider the following:
"The following numbers come from a CNN article about Obamacare…

The law sets a ceiling on how much consumers have to spend on health care. In 2019, it’s $7,900 for a single person and double that for a family. Some bronze plans peg their deductibles to those levels.

The average deductible for a 2019 bronze policy — which have higher deductibles, but lower premiums than other tiers of Obamacare plans — is nearly $5,900, while the average maximum of out-of-pocket limit is just under $7,000, according to Health Pocket, an online health insurance shopping tool. Family bronze plans have an average deductible of just under $12,200 and an average out-of-pocket maximum of nearly $14,000.

Obamacare did not address the issue of the high costs of healthcare in the USA. Both parties are complicit in this failure of leadership.

MarvinSussman

LOOK AT THE BOTTOM LINE!!

The Green New Deal will raise your taxes sky high and you can’t afford it, so… Well, you know the rest: the GND is great in theory but it will cost too much. That, in a phrase, is the argument against the GND.

But that is the dishonest argument of a con man. The first thing to know about economics is that if something can be done technically, it can be done financially. The GND is a major investment that must be evaluated like all investments: by looking at the bottom line. And your bottom line is not your tax bill. Your bottom line is your net worth as a result of the GND: how will it affect your bank account? The rest of this essay will examine how the GND is financed and how that affects your bottom line.

Typically, the first question asked is: “Where will the money come from?” That’s the wrong question. We all know where the money for Medicare For All will come from. It will come from the only legitimate source of money: the US Treasury, in the form of Treasury checks to people. That’s also the source of money for aircraft carriers. There is no other legitimate source of Congressional money.

The right question to ask is: “Where is all that money going?” The annual cost of health care for 300 million Americans at an average cost of $10 thousand each is $3 trillion. If we include the annual cost of expense-paid university education for all qualified students and the annual cost of replacing f****l f**ls with g***n e****y, we have to add another trillion. That $4 trillion dollars will about double the current amount of annual Congressional spending. Where will all that new $4 trillion go? That is one thing we do know! It will follow the path of last year’s $4 trillion. Let’s have a look and see what actually happened.

When Congress spends $4 trillion, 10% or $400 billion lands in domestic private bank accounts. Yes, deficit spending equals after-tax savings! That’s why World War II spending gave us 30 years of prosperity. War workers cashed in war bonds for cars, homes, and kids. If Congress spends $8 trillion, much more than $800 billion will land in those accounts because of “tax bracket creep”. Not bad!

Our problem will not be money but rather physical resources. Whereas we probably have enough resources for free education but, for Medicare for All, there will be a scarcity of doctors, dentists, etc., until free education provides enough personnel. For that reason, Medicare for All will have to be implemented gradually, starting with children up to age 19 plus students. Their robust health will have a minimal impact. Annually, additional age groups can be phased in from both ends of the age spectrum. We should also expect that foreign personnel would be attracted to US wages. That would hasten the maturation of the new healthcare system. Eventually, with expense-paid education for all, there will be enough doctors, dentists, oculists, nurses, and other medical personnel to satisfy our needs.

Most of the rest of the GND is g***n e****y. That will be a matter of training our millions of unemployed and under-employed for construction work. When material shortages arise and begin to cause harmful inflation, it may be necessary to drop production levels down to two shifts or even to one shift. The most important principle is maximum use of resources, especially time. The Green New Deal is the moral equivalent of war. If we want to save our planet, we must use every minute of our lives.

Above all, we must stop thinking of money as a scarce resource. Where Congress is concerned, money is only a number to be used to indicate the quantity of effort it demands from the private sector. Our only problem is the threat of inflation. And then, it’s only a warning to slow down to a jog instead of a sprint.

© 2019 Marvin Sussman. All rights reserved. Search: YouTube.com for Marvin Sussman!

ACP45 Loc: Rhode Island

Marvin, maybe I'm missing something here, but how does this relate to the current high cost of healthcare, the ACA, and the failure of both parties to deal with this issue? Do you not see the real problem is not "if something can be done technically, it can be done financially", but rather the lobbyists and politicians will not do anything that k**ls the golden goose. A lot of people have a vested interest in the status quo. That is the real problem.

jim_shipley

Congress has maximized their income and minimized their work and that will never change.

lpnmajor Loc: Arkansas

Tell me, in the decade since the ACA came into being, what effort has been put into fixing it? Why, none at all! The ACA handed the GOP the House of Representatives on a silver platter, who tried repeatedly to repeal it but failed. Being unable to repeal the ACA outright, the GOP began whittling away at it - to make the situation worse. Why would they do such a thing? To win the Senate of course. Along comes the Donald who renews the cries to repeal the ACA, but since the American people had been suffering under and increasingly predatory healthcare market, changes the mantra to "repeal and REPLACE"................which the GOP failed at again. The Donald summed it up quite nicely with " who knew healthcare was so complicated?". The answer to that complaint was obvious.............Democrats, who had been down that road already.

Republicans bowed out of the debates leading up to the passing of the ACA early on - which was then passed with Democrats v**es alone. To punish the Democrats and to appear as the hero in this story, the Republicans did not invite a single Democrat to the "replace the ACA" discussions, intending to pass it with Republican v**es alone.............and failed...............again.

The problem with the Affordable Care Act, is that it was incomplete when it first passed, the GOP refused to fix it once they gained control of the Congress, who began eroding elements of the law for political gain, and who now don't have any idea of what to do next.

jim_shipley

That would involve work which Congress has totally forgotten how to do. The only fix is to replace Congress.

son of witless

And replace him with one of the far left looney toons now running on the Democratic side ? Yea, that'll work.

woodguru

You are completely out of context about Obamacare, yes this is the state of where we are at now, it was way worse before Obamacare and had the GOP supported it and worked the aspects that could start to fix healthcare it is a workable start.

The reality? Why did my wife's Kaiser go from $350 a month in 2016 and $900 a month in 2017? The GOP did that.