The House Obamacare replacement bill does nothing to end the primary problem with Obamacare, which is the wildly popular but also psychotic ban on rejecting people over pre-existing conditions.
Would you buy car insurance if you could buy it after you crashed your car and still get paid? Would you buy life insurance if your heirs could buy it after you died and have it pay out? Then why would anyone buy health insurance if you can buy it after you already get sick and still be covered? Obamacare’s answer to this was threatening people with the unconstitutional individual mandate ‘tax,’ but they wimped out on actually making the penalty steep enough to force compliance and they wound up putting the insurance industry into an adverse selection death spiral. The House’s answer is to give people tax credits for it, which also is completely inadequate to reverse the death spiral. Nobody is actually going to try to stop the government from destroying the health insurance market entirely. They are going to keep stumbling until they’re forced to institute a single-payer system as an emergency and we’re going to see highly inefficient non-price rationing for health care like in Europe.
At some point people are going to have to accept that we need to actually economize on health care or we will spend the entire GDP of the country on trying to keep everyone alive forever at any cost until the economy collapses. I don’t know that the public is going to ever get to that point though. The government is just going to destroy the market and then blame the market for being destroyed.
Haha, the fact of the matter is that very few have good reason to trust that liberalization isn’t just economic handwaving to justify screwing them over for the benefit of the healthy and the wealthy. Why in the world would they trust you or people like you? Why should they comply with your plan? Normal people lack the tools to tell whether medical service is good! They’re irrational, forgetful, they don’t have perfect executive function, they don’t always have time let alone to learn enough to tell the difference and not get swamped by legalese created by companies to screw them.
You want to get this liberalization to go through? You need to take a lesson from Trump. You’re going to have to publicly sacrifice something very expensive to prove that you’re serious. Charity is NOT going to cut it.
Everything you just said applies many times over in the opposite direction
“ Haha, the fact of the matter is that very few have good reason to trust that regulation isn’t just economic handwaving to justify screwing them over for the benefit of the healthy and the wealthy. Why in the world would they trust you or people like you? Why should they comply with your plan? Legislators lack the tools to tell whether medical service is good! They’re irrational, forgetful, they don’t have perfect executive function, they don’t always have time let alone to learn enough to tell the difference and not get swamped by legalese created by companies to screw them.”
Look. You claim you want an efficient system, right? Not just trading someone else’s increase in suffering for another $10,000 worth of luxury car for yourself, right?
I like an efficient system. More healthcare can be purchased for the same amount of money in an efficient system. But as far as I’m concerned, if the money just gets redistributed upwards it’s worthless to my goals, so I have no reason to free up those resources for the sole purpose of them being captured by the wealthy so they can plow them into political campaigns to further undermine public ownership of the state.
And I have no reason to believe that the people complaining about how they have to pay taxes to help those accursed poor single mother welfare recipients are really going to put an equivalent amount of money into charity. Why would I?
But I do like efficiency, so I’m willing to make a trade. If it’s really an efficiency solution, not just a cash grab for the upper class, then we can keep current healthcare spending, oh, or maybe a little lower, so let’s say on par with those evil European countries as a percentage of GDP, and cut everyone a check evenly just for healthcare funds. Let them put it in a health savings account, spend it on insurance, maybe let the unspent health savings be inherited or something. Collect %s of future checks to offset the costs of emergency care for the uninsured.
Maybe not a check, maybe that’s not the most efficient method in particular, but you get the idea.
If you’re willing to make that sacrifice or one like it, then, maybe I and others could believe that this is actually, really about efficiency.
(Edit: Also, on a side-note since it’s not really the core purpose of this post, as the core purpose is to offer that above ideological trade - legislators are actually paid to do legislation, and they have staffs and think-tanks that work for the parties at their disposal. Specialization of labor doesn’t just apply to the private sector. Individual citizens largely don’t have these things and the trust networks around them are different since there’s a lot of money to be made by scamming people (see: homeopathics are still a thing). So there is some reason to believe that the political parties and legislators might outperform individuals. Now, regulatory capture is an issue, but since the proposed solution tends to be “just let companies do whatever they want”, and that usually is the situation that caused regulation to come into existence in the first place, it often isn’t a real solution. I think government itself can be designed much better, but others seem to either believe we don’t need to, or that it’s impossible, so…)