If everyone just said fuck it and stopped paying their insurance, it would crash not just those companies, but domino into taking out the entire stock market.
Like, these companies are worth so much, and they invest in others and people invest in them. If their entire revenue stream is stopped at once that’s it.
Which makes it kind of a nuclear option, one I’ve intentionally not mentioned and haven’t seen anyone else either.
But the day may be coming
Corporations mainly pay for health insurance. Imagine employee’s reactions being told they were getting cut off. Not going to happen.
If the employee cancels their plan, the corp ain’t going to keep paying.
I don’t know why someone would read my comment and imagine I meant corporations should cancel their employees insurance…
But I think that’s what happened here
We don’t get to drop out of plans at a whim.
I’m on VA, so I admittedly don’t know much.
But to my knowledge marketplace can be cancelled at any time, thru employer may only be certain times.
But I do know you can stop any non court ordered payroll deduction at any time…
Some dumbasses even do it for OASDI and tax withholding and then act shocked when they get the bill at end of year.
You have a point I missed!
Interesting idea, but you’d need to get employers on board. Many of whom are publicly traded companies.
When someone stops paying their insurance, they stop getting healthcare. Most people don’t want that.
It’s kind of like saying “If everyone said fuck it and set their car on fire, then oil companies would suffer”. Yes, but they aren’t the only ones who would suffer.
When someone stops paying their insurance, they stop getting healthcare.
When people pay their insurance, they don’t get healthcare either.
No, they generally do get health care. In fact, most insured adults give their health insurance an overall rating of “excellent” or “good”, even if they are in poor health.
It’s true that there are horror stories, but those are not the majority.
Which is why there was so much sympathy for the UHC CEO and why his killer is universally hated.
29% of people have “very unfavorable” views of Luigi Mangione, compared to only 13% of Brian Thompson. The vast majority believe his murder was not justified.
It sure is neat seeing under which circumstances lemmy regards polls as reliable.
Were you one of the Lemmy users who thought Trump was “universally hated”? If so, you were in for a big surprise there too.
Which is exactly why we’ll never have single payer: It would crash the economy and put millions out of work.
Downvote me all you want but it’s the exact reason Obama gave for not pushing single payer
I’m not sure how that puts people out of work? Still need people to process the claims, they would just work for the government vs the company. Which for them would probably be better long term getting federal benefits and retirement.
I always figured a great deal of those people would move to government work. They already have the expertise.
The problem is that there are large parts of those companies that are replicated multiple times that would be made redundant.
Each company has an IT department, legal department, marketing department, and claims department, among a lot else. Most of those would be redundant or unnecessary in a single payer system.
Part of the reason single payer is more cost effective is eliminating administrative overhead. And “administrative overhead “ is code for jobs.
Any job that gets between a patient and the care they need is a job that needs to die.
No doubt. I’m an antiwork radical and think nobody should have a job. But the one thing both political parties and the public seem to agree on is “more jobs” so anyone who says “less jobs” isn’t going to get elected.
And what will you do with all these unemployed people?
And that seems logical! But we’ve talked about combining the local city and county for cost savings. Turns out, it wouldn’t be too big a deal.
Not like if we doubled the population we’d need the same amount of people approving construction planning. We’d pretty much need double. And that’s one of 1,000 examples.
But you’re spot on with admin overhead! That would indeed drop. Not by half, as in my example, but it would certainly drop. The biggest drop would be profit. And we can all agree healthcare shouldn’t run like private enterprise.
I’m totally with you. Yes, got single-payer would slash thousands and thousands of jobs, maybe a million or three. And yes, that would fucking hurt. It’s like the Obama quotes you posted. We didn’t start on a level playing field, we started in a ditch.
Lemmy hates our sort of discourse. “NO! It’s all very simple! Why won’t you talk simple!”
I’m 100% on board with Medicare for all and have been since 2016. I’m just trying to recognize logistical and political speedbumps
Lemmy: NO! SIMPLE ONLY!
You’re fighting an uphill battle.
How?
For the same reason not paying our insurance will crash the economy: Big parts of it would go out of business.
The obvious solution is to put a plan into place to transition to a new system over time. There’s no reason it has to come all at once, unless there’s a viable way to do that without collapsing markets.
The conclusion to any problem is never, and should never, be “Welp! The problem is too big to fix now! Guess we’ll just leave it as it is!”. Every problem has a solution. Most problems have more than one.
Further than that, as a recently unemployed working class person who was paycheck to paycheck before my freelance gigs dried up a month and a half ago (slow season started early this year), fuck the stock market. Why should I worry about the extractors losing money when they have already created a system in which, through no lack of effort on my part, I have nothing left to lose. I’m in the top 10% of technicians in my city, in a very niche field, in one of the largest cities in the US, and I can’t afford my bills because my industry is dominated by a single monopoly. Anyone who doesn’t serve the monopoly directly either serves it indirectly, or feeds on its scraps. Small company owners (I’ve worked with many) justify paying people just slightly more than the starvation wages the monopoly doles out. Unions are gaining ground, but it’s very slow progress and they haven’t really expanded far beyond entry level positions yet, which I leveled out of well over a decade ago.
Fuck the stock market. Fuck the rich. Why should I care about them when all they do is extract?
I don’t disagree with you but I do not believe our government is capable of a decade-long transition to single payer.
Why not? All they have to do is make a single payer option available. Make it functional and accessible, and people will switch to it as their current insurance policies end, or when they move to their next job. The health insurance stock market will likely initially dive, then stabilize into a long downward slope. I’m sure the feds have all kinds of “quantitative-easing” tools they can use to make the process less painful for the ownership class. Whatever pain they do feel would be a necessary consequence of the wrongs they have committed being made right.
-
Privatize ALL the health insurance companies.
-
Reduce inefficiencies (fire all the parasites that don’t do actual work, like the CEO’s, etc)
-
Continue operations as normal, but now with 100% guaranteed claim coverage.
-
Over time, phase out the need for people to “deal with insurance” at all and make the whole thing transparent.
-
The stock market has survived fire sales before and it will survive it again. Oops we got too large to easily stop has never been cause for anything except getting the stick out and beating them down to size.
Somebody call Luigi.
He really has talent in choosing all his picks. “Ummm who could be the worst person ever to fill this role?”
Single payer healthcare is so complex to implement that only 22 of the 23 most developed countries in the world have done it.
The US system is grotesque.
The US system is state sanctioned terrorism of the civilian population by the plutocracy, for profit.
Part of the problem for the US is that such a huge amount of gdp is buried in the masses of beauracracy that makes up the US healthcare system, it’s essentially acting (economically) as proxy government spending to prop up a failing economy. The average US citizen is so heavily propaganda’d into hating government run projects that the sensible economic stimulus (government infrastructure projects or public services) are well and truly off the table.
What this ultimately means is fixing healthcare isn’t just breaking up the cartels, preventing price fixing and untangling the web of nonsense that makes up the US private system… unless you want to inspire a massive crash (which absolutely has real human cost), it also means redistributing government spending and implementing (unrelated) government run services and/or projects to keep all these people employed (which would also mean re-training and potentially relocating) - all of which needs to be done against the overwhelmingly loud voices screeching “government employee bad”.
While I agree with the sentiment (where this should be the case), this isn’t actually true for some of these countries.
Australia, for example, though not sure if we’re included in this 23, we have a private system also.
For all emergency care, it’s single-payer. Private health insurance / private hospitals are not permitted to provide emergency care, nor out of hospital car, but all other hospital care is allowed (I am simplifying, as I’m not super clear on it either). Further, private health insurance is not allowed to cover things that Medicare doesn’t at least also partially cover.
Sounds good right? Sounds like private health is kept in check? I mean, sort of, but it’s still really profitable, and you even get a tax break.
What it doesn’t stop, is prices getting higher and you having to cover the difference because health care employees are not necessarily employed by the stat, and can set their own prices (which is either covered by private insurance in hospital, or out-of-pocket outside hospital as private can’t cover that).
If you don’t have private health, you often have to wait way longer in the public system for non-emergency (but still medically necessary) care, like hip replacements, eye surgery etc.
It’s kinda fucked, everyone ought to be in the same queue, and if things are taking too long well then gee, I dunno, pay more / hire more / train more doctors, this doesn’t take a genius to figure out.
Healthcare should be provided by the state, in-full, covered by taxes. We (and the US for that matter) have plenty of tax revenue to cover this. And if you’re feeling really frisky, perhaps very slightly increase corporate taxes and tax breaks for the wealthy.
So we now have a two tiered system, where the wealthy get care first, or whoever can afford to pay. And you even get a tax break for it.
The US system is trash, and ours is utopian by comparison, but let’s not pretend like all 22 of 23 countries have true, universal healthcare.
We don’t, let’s aim higher haha
Just think: you all did the right thing, holding your nose at the polls, voting for Fetterman to block Oz. And now you have both of them.
Life, uh, finds a way…
Not fucking happy about it. Worst possible outcome.
Brain damage causes conservatism.
Nah, I probably have some decent brain damage and am solidly progressive.
Hmm yeah fair point, I’m in the same boat.
Proposed amendment: enough brain damage causes conservatism.
We better lay off the concussions, got it haha
Same here. My brain injury made me even more radical. If anything has me wondering if I’ve gone paranoid and insane seeing all this coming danger while the rest of the world just goes about their business.
Delay, deny, depose
America Last. WTF, the Government of Putin wants an epidemic to break out. How many people in the red run welfare counties would be affected by Dr. Oz’s plan? Indeed, a shit ton and they voted for it.
I’ll make it much simpler to understand. The only thing putin wants. Is America out of the way. Whatever form that takes. So that he can pursue his plans in Eurasia.
what he really meant is that non millionaires dont deserve world class health care
What a piece of shit.
Oz went on to explain that most people have misread the Constitution and Bill of rights, people can have life OR liberty OR the pursuit of happiness. Only the rich will get all three…
FFS, this guy thinks it’s a prix fixe menu!
It’s neat watching lemmy’s centrists acting like they object to the idea of letting people go bankrupt and die, in that order, for insurance companies’ bottom lines.
Democrats killed the public option before a single Republican voted on the bill. Joe Lieberman was enough of a Democrat to run for VP, and you don’t get to disown him just because he did what you wanted but don’t want to admit wanting. And it’s not like he did what every centrist wanted by his lonesome, either. Ben Nelson was instrumental in killing the public option.
Biden promised that he was going to revisit the public option. Like so much of what he promised, it was always a fucking lie.
Did anyone read the article? I didn’t really understand it, the way he phrased it. I mean I’m not defending him or anything. He said a lot of other crap, but in the article it sounded like he was saying uninsured didn’t DESERVE the right to health, but rather didn’t currently(2013) POSSESS the right to health, because they were uninsured. He said that people should be screened for free. Not sure what kind of screening he was talking about but…
Is that the way you read it?
I agree with him. That’s why I think we should ensure that everyone has some amount of medical coverage.
