patrick.net

That's heart wrenching

The should have taken McCain with them.

Tenpoundbass says

The should have taken McCain with them.

I want to ask you if your health care covers mental health, but Patrick would probably hit the uncivil button, so I won't. Somehow, you wishing McCain is dead multiple times throughout the day is civil. Perhaps I should only question the mental health of anybody who would bother wishing death on McCain for his vote.

ObamaCare is a complete disaster.

We need to wait to hear the details to see what was going on with these people. Blaming Obamacare at this point seems weird, especially because Obamacare likely subsidized their insurance. I'm basing it on their age bracket and that they stated that they had big health issues. Obamacare used revenue from young to subsidize the old and revenue from healthy to subsidize the sick.

I'd also want to see the details, but there are many BIG problems with Obamacare:

* It's a tax, ultimately enforced at gunpoint, which extracts arbitrary amounts of money from the public and hands it over to private insurance companies. Not good.
* There is no upper limit on how high premiums can go.
* It does less than zero to contain extortionist medical prices for simple things like aspirin in a hospital.
* It does not require any provider to publish a list of prices so that consumers can shop for lower cost health care without spending 100% of their waking hours on the phone, mostly on hold.

They have to keep some parts of the economy at home growing. Outside of education/housing/healthcare, what else will grow?

Heraclitusstudent says

Outside of education/housing/healthcare, what else will grow?

Reliance on those money-sinks to create an "economy" is a consequence of the globalist devastation of American manufacturing in search of short term profits at the expense of every factory between the coasts.

rando says

* It's a tax, ultimately enforced at gunpoint

It's not extracted at gunpoint. There is merely a monetary penalty for not using it. It's a forced insurance program, and has strong similarities to social security, medicaid, medicare, and car insurance, which is mandatory for anybody who wants to drive. rando says

* There is no upper limit on how high premiums can go

There's also no upper limit to how high the price of bread or rental housing will go.

rando says

* It does less than zero to contain extortionist medical prices ..
* It does not require any provider to publish a list of prices so that consumers can shop for lower cos

These go together, and they are a huge problem. Strangely, I didn't hear any debate about fixing this from Trump or the Senate. Some parts of the system are intractable anyway. You are not going to negotiate for prices when you have had a heart attack. It only works for non-urgent issues.

Prices of insurance would come down if
1) We stopped subsidizing it with tax cuts for people who choose to spend their money in the approved way.
2) We started offering plans that subsidize good behavior (i.e. working out and eating well)
3) We started incentivizing the individual to reap the savings from seeking lower cost solutions.
4) We stopped incentivizing providers to do more procedures and start incentivizing outcomes
or
5) We scrap trying to use free market to run basic health care.

YesYNot says

It's a forced insurance program, and has strong similarities to social security, medicaid, medicare, and car insurance, which is mandatory for anybody who wants to drive.

It's very different from government programs like social security, medicaid, medicare in that you are forced to hand over money to private corporations which lobby congress to get legal authorization to take ever more.

Car insurance is similar in that it forces citizens to pay private companies in order to drive, but that's not nearly as bad as forcing everyone in a country to pay potentially unlimited amounts to private insurance corporations simply because they are alive.

YesYNot says

There's also no upper limit to how high the price of bread or rental housing will go.

There is meaningful competition in both bread and rental housing. Those are markets. You have the ability to shop and lower your costs, or to replace bread with rice, for example.

Medical care is not a market because:

* Medical prices are very well-hidden to the point where it is impossible to do accurate comparison shopping. There is no price list.
* Some care is not optional. You will die without it. In such a case, the price must be fixed by law or we will simply have extortion. Which is already happening.

YesYNot says

Strangely, I didn't hear any debate about fixing this from Trump

Trump did talk about requiring medical providers to publish price lists, but only during the campaign. He has not mentioned it since the election afaik, which is disappointing.

They lived close to Wall Street with their two children, Isabella, 20, and Joseph, 19.

But they still managed to sent their two schools to private school, at the elite Loyola School on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Tuition at the Jesuit-run Catholic school is $8,905 for the current year.

So these people cheat on their taxes, live in the center of Manhattan, send their kids to private school, but it's healthcare that was their problem? I doubt it. Their credit binge caught up with them and they couldn't borrow any more money. Trying to blame this on healthcare is a cop out.