What We Learned from a Year of Americans ‘Risking It’ Without Insurance

Re:What We Learned from a Year of Americans ‘Risking It’ Wit... by SolaceQuantum on Friday December 28, 2018 @04:20PM (#18779506)

I agree that the government is busted. But from what I understand, one of the two ruling parties is at least somewhat pro-socialized medicine. I do not understand what needs to be compromised about socialized medicine. I struggle with the idea that fear of the government is greater than the desire for universal medical coverage.

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Re:What We Learned from a Year of Americans ‘Risking It’ Wit... by michaelt on Friday December 28, 2018 @04:50PM (#18779738)

Imagine if there were several powerful allied special interest groups that all made a bunch of money from healthcare staying expensive.

And they're not just trying to change your mind. They're also working to get the support of the electorate directly.

Now imagine some of those groups had absolutely superb PR. Literally making childhood cancer sufferers healthy again.

Now imagine, like every industry that wants government influence, they hire your friends into highly paid do-nothing jobs, donate generously when you raise money for your charitable foundation, and so on.

Now imagine they're a big employer. And they've got a whole bunch of jobs. Office jobs. Highly paid high-level jobs. Well paid mid-level jobs. Jobs that employ lots of minority groups.

Now imagine that the most efficient outcome would be to shut down all the insurance companies and nationalise all the hospitals, but you don't have the political capital to deliver that, it'd make a lot of people very nervous, and you're not even sure it'd be a moral thing to do anyway. So you'll probably have to settle for a middle ground that keeps a lot of the existing middlemen fat and happy.

Now imagine, even if your reform is a huge success and goes way better than you have any right to expect, people are still going to die in hospitals, and some people are going to say some of them are your fault.

Now imagine turning a blind eye to the problem has been working just fine for the last 20 years. It'd be so easy to just let sleeping dogs lie...

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Re:What We Learned from a Year of Americans ‘Risking It’ Wit... by baddox on Friday December 28, 2018 @04:31PM (#18779591)

Eh, the two ruling parties have cleverly worked things out so that they never have to actually implement any of the policies they claim to support. They can always just blame the other party for making their policies impossible. Both parties benefit from this system.

Look at Obamacare. A lot of Democrats will say that this was a genuine attempt to move toward single-payer, a public option, etc. and that they simply had to make compromises to get what they got passed (a change that undoubtedly helps many people but does so with a regressive tax, and certainly doesn’t simplify anything).

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Re:What We Learned from a Year of Americans ‘Risking It’ Wit... by masonic on Saturday December 29, 2018 @06:21AM (#18783122)

  they simply had to make compromises to get what they got passed

For much of that Congress, the Democrat caucus had complete control (with filibuster-proof control of the Senate); they didn't have to "compromise" with a single Republican, hence zero Republican votes.

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Re:What We Learned from a Year of Americans ‘Risking It’ Wit... by infinite8s on Friday December 28, 2018 @08:39PM (#18781116)

It was a compromise. The only way they could get Joe Lieberman's crucial 60th vote was to kill the public option, which he strongly opposed (for what reason who knows).

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