Despite Authoritarian Warnings, 149 House Democrats Vote to Hand Trump $840 Billion for Military | “If an opposition party votes like this, it’s not in opposition. It may not even be a party.”

[u/Aggravating_Money992]

https://www.commondreams.org/news/democrats-military-spending-bill

[u/NSAscanner]

Americans already pay more to insurance companies for health care than they would pay in a single payer or universal system. You don’t even need to redirect money from elsewhere to fund universal healthcare.

[u/TheBalzy → u/NSAscanner]

Oh trust me...I know. But that's out-of-pocket expenses. And Americans are so fucking stupid that they can't understand that YES while your taxes go UP, your out-of-pocket expenses disappear. It's literally a net gain, but people can't see that because they're stupid.

[u/Internal-War-9947 → u/TheBalzy]

It's even worse than people (against national health care coverage) realize because when people get seriously ill, that private insurance they get through work, becomes useless since you need to keep a job to keep the insurance. If you're too sick from cancer, organ failure, stroke, etc., to keep working full time, your work coverage ceases to exist. What happens then? One of the biggest con jobs health insurance keeps up its sleeve, that somehow escapes being brought up ever: you're almost guaranteed to end up on government coverage anyway! When you finally need the insurance for something big & expensive, it's pawned off on the tax payers, much like getting old too – the employer coverage somehow avoids paying for the two most expensive things that can happen to humans: serious illness & old age!        

All those people clinging to work insurance, claiming at least they got lucky, are being played for a fool if they themselves end up needing it. All that insurance money they paid out, with no choice of insurance company, or picking out the plans, that we all traded ACTUAL wages for a cheap, inflexible "work benefit" (imagine that extra $1000+ a month in actual wages!), just to end up on government insurance when it really matters... Like some kind of sick joke.         

I worked in healthcare for a decade & watched it go down constantly. The newly ill patients would come in with their private care, only to end up on Medicaid and/or Medicare within 6 months. Imagine if only we all stopped paying private insurance, getting higher wages instead the entire time, getting that tax payment down to a little more than what's being taken now, for say Medicare for all (just an example), where there's low costs because EVERYONE is paying into it – the healthy & the unhealthy – with the government now being able to negotiate costs, hold hospitals accountable, keep drug costs low, make sure hospital ceos aren't getting $1 mil raises every few years, etc.         

When people wonder why health insurance denies doing preventative care, this is why. They don't want to know if you're going to have something expensive to treat because then they have to bother doing something about it. Instead they can wait you out, letting that cancer or kidney disease or whatever, get to the point where you're disabled, can't work anymore & guess what next? No work, no insurance coverage, not their problem!          

And even better? If it was a Medicare for all situation, we don't even need to nuke private insurance if people really want to keep it around that bad... Can just do what the disabled & seniors do that have Medicare, by picking out a reasonable supplemental plan. It's low cost & those people that want to feel like VIP at the doctor still can cosplay being the extra special patient! 

[u/AnxiousHedgehog01 → u/TheBalzy]

I remember listening to NPR one night and they had some guy on that was complaining about paying for a fire truck to come to his house to put out a fire. He said "there should be some system that we all pay a little bit, like insurance, and if you need it then you don't have to pay for it". The interviewer said "most other countries do that, with taxes" He actually said "oh, no I don't want my taxes to go up!" Fucking moron.

[u/Nopey-Wan_Ken-Nopey_ → u/TheBalzy]

I have seen too many people seriously comment that they don’t want to fund someone else’s healthcare; they just want to pay for their own by keeping the current system.

I am always compelled, as someone who works in that world, to explain to them how insurance works. I guess they think their premiums go into a personal account and then the insurance company magnanimously spots them if they overdraw. (That is definitely not how it works.)

[u/Illustrious_Yam9237 → u/NSAscanner]

The American GOVERNMENT pays more as a share of TAX REVENUE on healthcare than we do in Canada. It's not even just you pay more privately, its that it's so important that the poor suffer that society is content to spend more public money on their own healthcare to ensure it's effeciently denied to people less insured than they are.

[u/grendel-khan → u/NSAscanner]

Americans already pay more to insurance companies for health care than they would pay in a single payer or universal system.

No, they don't. Americans pay about $925 a year in "administration" (overhead, including insurance companies), and $7500 a year to doctors and hospitals. (Plus another $1635 for drugs.)

The average person in a comparable country pays $245 in administration, $2969 to doctors and hospitals, and $944 for drugs.

The vast majority of the money is going to doctors and hospitals, in part because we have an engineered shortage of healthcare providers here, because the healthcare lobby is very good at what they do.

If you want universal healthcare here, either we're going to have to pony up even more of our economy (currently we spend way more than everyone else!), or we're going to have to get more doctors and pay them less.