The Costs Of Health Care
I keep hearing about we can’t afford this or that, but no real numbers to back up those statements, just references to the deficit.
Let me tell about some costs of the current system.
My Mother manages some apartments, and in the last decade there have been three tenants who moved in because of “medical divorces”. A medical divorce is when parents have to get a divorce so they can get Medicaid for a sick child; they had no other choice. Two people who love each other have to separate to get the medical attention that a child needs. That is a real cost of the current system.
Of course some people pay the ultimate price for our health care system. Jim Capozzola and Melanie Mattson are just two of them. Two intelligent, witty people who died because they could not afford the health care they needed.
How many more families must be broken up, how many more people must die, before the United States decides to provide the same access to health care as the rest of the developed world? Are the profits of insurance companies really more important than the lives of people?
Single-payer is the answer, and everyone with a brain and a heart knows it.
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Our States our no longer United….it’s become the Social Darwinism gameshow…and it has been rigged so the uber wealthy win everytime.
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Mr. Duff, forecasts are not real numbers, they are guesses, and the “numbers” on Social Security are fabrications based on ignoring the trust fund that governments have been using to cover their deficit spending, and will have to repay.
Real numbers are things like, more than 95¢ of Medicare dollars go for medical care, while less that 70¢ of private insurance dollars are actually spent for health care.
Of course taxes are going up if Medicare for All is passed, but a lots of costs will come down. Those are the real numbers that need to be out there.
Concerning Medicare part D, the Republicans added a provision in the bill that made it illegal for the government to negotiate the price of drugs. That bill required the government to pay whatever drug companies wanted to charge. That is one of the major reasons the program is so expensive. If they just switched to the Tricare system used for the military, the cost would plummet, but the Republicans were more interested in helping the drug companies than people.
Jill, the people who own the legislatures get to make the world whatever they want.