Democrat Bill Clinton not only balanced the budget, he managed to have 4 straight balanced budgets with surpluses. He didn't spend all of his time with his pants unzipped. He was also a moderate. Golly. From Wikipedia: He had budget surpluses for fiscal years 1998-2001, the only such years from 1970-2018. Clinton's final four budgets were balanced budgets with surpluses, beginning with the 1997 budget. The ratio of debt held by the public to GDP, a primary measure of U.S. federal debt, fell from 47.8% in 1993 to 33.6% by 2000.
It is a little deeper than that. Doctors often do excessive procedures and visits. Even if they don't they charge an exorbitant amount to the insurance companies. The big insurance companies aren't really people so nobody feels bad about it. The insurance companies pass the cost on to the consumers with co-pays, deductibles etc. All of that ratchets up the cost of healthcare. M4A would eliminate that. It also allow peolple to go to the doctors they want and since it would be covered they will go more frequently, have regular checkups, and get the preventative care that will end up with citizens being healthier. M4A also allows better bargaining for drug prices etc. In the end healthcare costs less, and people are healthier.
By having government regulations. Nothing will eliminate all fraud. Medicare has very high approval rating.
How does M4A fix excessive testing/procedures/visits? It would be even more rampant if it's all completely free for consumers. What incentive does a doctor or people have to not do every test in the book?
I wonder if the 20+ million people that got health care coverage under Obama's incremental change agree that it benefits no one? What about CHIP recipients from Clinton's time? Or people who've been able to keep their insurance thanks to HIPAA? I wonder if you feel Social Security should have never been passed since it was a small program initially? Or Medicare/Medicaid? This idea that anything less than total systemic change is worthless is both stupid and ignorant of history.
Because there is a single process rather than variations based on the different insurance plans. It would be easier to regulate. Furthermore the price of the tests/procedures would be uniform. I've been without insurance and gotten one price when paying out of pocket and another when paying by insurance. So the pricing would be standardized.
Medicare is efficient in a ton of ways and is a good model to work from, but it does have far more fraud than private insurance. Government regulations don't fix that. And high approval ratings have nothing to do with fraud since consumers aren't affected by it and wouldn't lower their approval as a result. The fundamental problem with Medicare is that it only works in conjunction with private insurance, which subsidizes it. Doctors and hospitals can't survive on Medicare reimbursement rates. If we aim to move to M4A, that issue has to be addressed first. If doctors and hospitals are going to get 50% less than otherwise, how do you make up that shortfall? There are a few choices: 1. Doctors, nurses, and everyone can take substantially lower wages. 2. We can slash employmeent of nurses, support staff, etc. 3. Cut the # of doctors and have each one run through lots more patients and make up the shortfall in volume, while reducing quality of care. You can make up a little of it from importing drugs and taking out some insurance administrators, etc - but that's a tiny sliver of the pie. Beyond that, some combination of the above 3 things are going to make up the bulk of the savings, and when we talk about that, M4A becomes a whole lot less popular.
Pricing being standardized doesn't really change anything there, though. There are certainly different rates now - but that's not the cause of overtesting. The doctor doesn't know the rate when he or she orders the test. If anything, the consumer having to pay is what provides a brake on overtesting - doctors can't just perform every possible test because the patient is not going to go for it. If everything is free, neither the doctor nor the patient has any incentive to say no.
Right - but that's option #3 (without cutting the # of doctors, I guess). If doctors have to go through more volume to make the same amount of money, they have to reduce quality of care. If they could cut patient time without cutting quality of care, they'd be doing that now and making more money.
Beyond the other arguments, though, I think this gets to the heart of the issue. What is the logic of restructuring 16% of the US economy over 3-4 years when there are endless things that we simply don't know? If it goes poorly, you've potentially wrecked the entire US economy. It's a massive real-world experiment of a theory using people as guinea pigs.
I think it can reduce the quality but won't always. I know doctors who have schedules both in hours per day and days of the week worked that still have time to increase without suffering a loss of quality.
But the experiment has been completed in other nations. It will help the US economy by reducing illness time away from work, more productivity at work, fewer bankruptcies, and reduced healthcare costs.
Pete has the best chance of winning because he has a light track record to attack. That said, the Dems don't want that. They want dirty proven players who play their type of ball.
A light track record of soft racism and ignorance. Bernie Sanders has a 40 year record and they still can't find anything on him.
If Bernie was the most desires candidate he’d be higher in the polls. Right now that continues to be Biden.
"The Democratic primary’s generational divide": On a superficial level it seems somewhat counterintuitive for younger voters to swarm to an elderly white man, but from an ideological perspective it makes perfect sense. Sanders has been the millennial favorite since 2016, and the Vermont senator's calls for Medicare-for-all, free college, and aggressive taxation, among other plans, are far more in tune with the younger generation's political attitudes and beliefs than any other candidate in the race. And his record of consistency over the past 50 years only reinforces his appeal. A recent Economist/YouGov poll found that 57 percent of under-30 primary voters are considering voting for Sanders, while 34 percent say he is their first choice (the highest of any of the Democratic candidates). On the other hand, just 21 percent of voters over 65 are considering a vote for Sanders, and a mere 3 percent of these voters support him as their first choice. Buttigieg, by contrast, is far closer in his political orientation to the older liberals who have spent most of their adult life in the neoliberal era. For all of Mayor Pete's talk about how we can't return to the "old normal," he hasn't articulated how he would be any different from previous Democratic administrations, and has flatly rejected some of the more bold and progressive plans currently gaining traction in the Democratic Party (and supported by candidates like Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren). Instead, he has increasingly presented himself as the centrist alternative to Joe Biden, effectively promoting the same message as the former vice president, but with a fresh new face. This has made him appealing to older voters, but not with millennials or Gen-Z voters. The same poll found that just 22 percent of 18-29 year old voters are considering voting for Buttigieg, while nearly 50 percent of voters over 65 are considering the mayor (additionally, 12 percent of over-65 voters have Buttigieg as their first choice, compared to 7 percent of 18-29 year olds). https://theweek.com/articles/880121/democratic-primarys-generational-divide
It is a media black out. The media is against Bernie always. If Bernie was coddled and shielded the same way as Biden or Pete, he would be higher in the polls without a doubt. Like it or not, mainstream media is vital in disseminating information to people that have no time to scour the internet. It's the reason why younger voters who live on the internet favor Bernie Sanders. If MSNBC and CNN were accurate and unbiased in their reporting, and didn't have their thumb on the scale, Bernie would absolutely be higher in the polls.
The strangest thing about this is that they won’t consider Bernie or Warren, but will consider Tulsi. If you look at her platform, she’s right there with Warren and Sanders in regards to her stances and is very liberal. Hell, Bernie will probably pick her as VP if he wins the nomination. Thats what makes no sense about the Tulsi love coming from the right...other then her attack on the Democratic Party. But, if those folks want that, why not just go with Bernie who isn’t even a registered Democrat and has regularly done battle with the Democratic Party.
