Bernie Force Hillary to Support Medicare Buy IN

That would be a smart move at the end of the primaries and if Sanders endorses her. If she does it now it will feed into the narrative that she is saying anything to get elected.

 

I suggest you read a piece before commenting on it.

Which I've noticed you still haven't responded to regarding the substance of it in the other thread.

Anyway I don't know Sanders personally to dislike him. I don't like how he's conducting his campaign here in the later stages and don't agree with him on several issues or accept the idea that he is or can lead a political revolution. Besides that I respect he's a passionate person who stands up for his issues. From what I've seen in interviews too he seems like a funny guy.

I don't think you're all monolithic but as I've pointed out before I've responded to specific instances where you and others have basically regurgitated the same lines almost word for word.

And yes I am fully aware that I come off as condescending and pedantic. It's nothing personal just how I debate. Particularly to people who argue from a point of passion and emotion. I don't know if you were here when Batman Jones was. We would go round and round especially during the 2008 elections. Always liked the guy and really enjoyed hanging out with him in person. We will never see eye to eye on a lot of issues but still think he's a great guy.

You've said several things regarding her being corrupt, bought and sold and etc..

Evidence to my previous sentence above.

 

Well if by how bad my back and knees ache then yes I'm hitting middle age. I didn't think bots were supposed to feel pain..

 

Probably the same reason you give all the credit to Sanders.

Actually she has a pretty detailed plan.
https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/health-care/
[not posting the plan as it is pretty long but can be read at the link]

Her later thinking how? She's continuing to push for health care reform and has laid out a detailed plan.

Yet again woe is Glynch. He's the only one who understands people's suffering.

Except it's not Medicare. Medicare is publicly financed program designed to pay for health care coverage for the elderly and disabled. It's administered through private insurance companies and paid for by a payroll tax. Sanders calls his program "Medicare for all" but it doesn't just build on it it fundamentally changes it.
https://berniesanders.com/issues/medicare-for-all/
[rquoter]THE PLAN
BETTER COVERAGE
Bernie’s plan would create a federally administered single-payer health care program. Universal single-payer health care means comprehensive coverage for all Americans. Bernie’s plan will cover the entire continuum of health care, from inpatient to outpatient care; preventive to emergency care; primary care to specialty care, including long-term and palliative care; vision, hearing and oral health care; mental health and substance abuse services; as well as prescription medications, medical equipment, supplies, diagnostics and treatments. Patients will be able to choose a health care provider without worrying about whether that provider is in-network and will be able to get the care they need without having to read any fine print or trying to figure out how they can afford the out-of-pocket costs.

WHAT IT MEANS FOR PATIENTS
As a patient, all you need to do is go to the doctor and show your insurance card. Bernie’s plan means no more copays, no more deductibles and no more fighting with insurance companies when they fail to pay for charges.

GETTING HEALTH CARE SPENDING UNDER CONTROL
We outspend all other countries on the planet and our medical spending continues to grow faster than the rate of inflation. Creating a single, public insurance system will go a long way towards getting health care spending under control. The United States has thousands of different health insurance plans, all of which set different reimbursement rates across different networks for providers and procedures resulting in high administrative costs. Two patients with the same condition may get very different care depending on where they live, the health insurance they have and what their insurance covers. A patient may pay different amounts for the same prescription depending solely on where the prescription is filled. Health care providers and patients must navigate this complex and bewildering system wasting precious time and resources.

By moving to an integrated system, the government will finally have the ability to stand up to drug companies and negotiate fair prices for the American people collectively. It will also ensure the federal government can track access to various providers and make smart investments to avoid provider shortages and ensure communities can access the providers they need.[/rquoter]

That it is a single payer insurance plan that covers the entire continuum of care means that it is different than Medicare which is for the elderly and disabled and goes through private insurance.

Where it is most difference is in how it's paid for.
[rquoter]THE PLAN WOULD BE FULLY PAID FOR BY:
A 6.2 percent income-based health care premium paid by employers.
Revenue raised: $630 billion per year.
A 2.2 percent income-based premium paid by households.
Revenue raised: $210 billion per year.This year, a family of four taking the standard deduction can have income up to $28,800 and not pay this tax under this plan.
A family of four making $50,000 a year taking the standard deduction would only pay $466 this year.

Progressive income tax rates.
Revenue raised: $110 billion a year.Under this plan the marginal income tax rate would be:
37 percent on income between $250,000 and $500,000.
43 percent on income between $500,000 and $2 million.
48 percent on income between $2 million and $10 million. (In 2013, only 113,000 households, the top 0.08 percent of taxpayers, had income between $2 million and $10 million.)
52 percent on income above $10 million. (In 2013, only 13,000 households, just 0.01 percent of taxpayers, had income exceeding $10 million.)[/rquoter]

Sanders plan both increases the payroll tax but also introduces several new taxes to pay for it. Those are far beyond what is current medicare.

Note. I'm not making a value judgement on Sanders, or Clinton's plan which is something we can debate, but pointing out how fundamentally different it is than existing Medicare.

 

Posting this here than starting a new thread. I will agree that single payer is a goal that we should be working for but as this piece shows it won't be easy and even if it was truly Medicare for all that it will be very expensive.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/17/u...still-be-expensive.html?partner=msft_msn&_r=0

Why Single-Payer Health Care Would Probably Still Be Expensive

Bernie Sanders’s chances at enacting a “political revolution” are all but gone. But that doesn’t mean his policy agenda won’t continue to be felt in this election or future Democratic platforms.

One of his signature proposals is to move the country’s health care system to a government-run, single-payer system. Last week, Hillary Clinton nodded in that direction, suggesting that she would be open to allowing Americans older than 50 to buy into the government Medicare program that currently covers those 65 and older.

But also last week, a detailed analysis of the Sanders health care plan from researchers at the Urban Institute showed that it would probably cost the government double what the campaign proposed. It is the second credible analysis to suggest that the Sanders plan costs more than advertised. (The other comes from the Emory health policy professor Kenneth Thorpe.)

The Sanders plan is light on some key details, but even in sketch form, it seems clear that it would require even bigger tax increases than the sizable ones the campaign has called for.

If you look around the world, lots of countries have single-payer systems. And all of them pay substantially less for health care than we do in the United States. I am reminded of this often, in the comments of some of my articles. So how could a single-payer system here still be so expensive?

One reason is that the Sanders plan covers far more than typical insurance plans in the United States — or abroad. The Sanders plan would charge no premiums, require no out-of-pocket spending and would pay for services like dental care and long-term nursing home stays. Those things boost the total price tag.

But imagine a universe where we had a single-payer health plan that was more like normal insurance. Perhaps it would be a true “Medicare for all,” where everyone has exactly the insurance that the federal government currently provides to older people and the disabled.

That Medicare-for-all plan would still cost more than single-payer plans in other countries. Here’s why: Medicare pays doctors and hospitals higher prices than single-payer systems do in other countries.

“The big thing is that providers here make quite a bit more money than they do anywhere else, and in order to get in the ballpark of where these other countries are, you’d have to reduce payment rates to physicians to much, much lower levels,” said John Holahan, one of the authors of the Urban analysis. “That’s just hard to do.”

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which looks at a group of developed countries, has found that the United States pays substantially higher prices for doctors, hospital stays and prescription drugs than the rest of the group. Medicare pays less than the United States average, but not enough less to make up that difference.

Making the American health care system significantly cheaper would mean more than just cutting the insurance companies out of the game and reducing the high administrative costs of the American system. It would also require paying doctors and nurses substantially lower salaries, using fewer new and high-tech treatments, and probably eliminating some of the perks of American hospital stays, like private patient rooms.

The average family physician in the United States earns $207,000, according to the Medscape Physician Compensation Report. General practitioners in Britain, which has a single-payer system, earn $81,000 to $122,000. The gaps in pay for specialists are even bigger.

The Urban Institute report assumes that the Sanders plan would cut pay for doctors substantially, but not by half. That’s a reasonable assumption.

We also pay more for drugs than the rest of the world, but many experts think that a single-payer health plan could push down drug prices because drug companies earn such high profit margins. The Urban analysis assumes that the country could quickly get to prices 25 percent lower than what Medicare pays. (That change assumes a political revolution, of course, because the pharmaceutical companies are an extremely effective lobby.)

The Sanders campaign disputes some of the Urban Institute’s assumptions. The Sanders team thinks, for example, that drug prices could be pushed even lower. And it argues that the researchers overestimated the costs associated with administering the government program. But it doesn’t argue that the prices paid to medical providers could be cut more sharply.

The same problem exists for other attempts to reduce health spending in the United States. Efforts by the Obama administration to pay doctors and hospitals differently are designed to squeegee some waste out of the system, by eliminating extra care that may not help people’s health. But it has done little to change the prices paid for medical care. That means that its best hope is to “bend the cost curve,” or reduce the rate that health spending grows.

Republican proposals to make health care into more of a free market also tend to assume that they will slow spending growth, not actually reduce it.

The Sanders plan would require a huge reorganization of the country’s health care system. Overnight, it would put the private insurance industry out of business, along with many other businesses that support it. It would shift billions of dollars of spending from individuals, workers and states into the federal budget. Doing that might well reduce some of the country’s health care spending that is going toward insurer profits and paper-pushing.

But more than 80 percent of the dollars we currently spend on health care actually go toward health care. And making big cuts all at once to doctors and hospitals could cause substantial disruptions in care. Some hospitals would go out of business. Some doctors would default on their mortgages and student loans. Even if the country decided that medicine should become a more middle-class profession — not an obvious outcome, given the substantial public support for the medical professions — it would be difficult to get there at once.

All of that means that bringing a government-run, single-payer health care system could achieve many of the goals of its advocates: more equity, lower complexity and some reductions in cost. But the United States would probably continue to have the most expensive health care system in the world. And we’d have to raise taxes high enough to pay for it.