FYI, I don't support a lot of welfare programs and I know those programs get abused. I think healthcare is different. Help people who are in need of medical care, especially their kids who, through no fault of their own, were not allowed to pick their parents. I'm also fine with giving the poor enough in benefits to make sure they don't live by me. And I was poor once and briefly was on food stamps (the actual stamps).
OT: what is up with Tate and Medicaid expansion?
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not true. 100% funded through the end of 2028 without $1 to the state budget. The House and Senate know this and that is why they want a risk free trial run....because it's going to be on a ballot initiative sooner or later, and will pass with a greater majority than the Devil's lettuce initiative did....the other 10% funded via tax.....can cancel if doesnt work....Tater is on the wrong side of this
Medicare is classified as Social Insurance. You pay the premium for Part A while you are working. Then when you retire if you want Part B they take the premium out of your Social Security. If you want Part C you have to buy that through a private insurance company. If you don't buy Part C Medicare sucks and if you don't and want medication coverage you have to buy Part D.
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I’ll again preface this with I have no idea what I’m talking about… but aren’t we one of the few developed countries that does not have universal healthcare? So are we just that much smarter then everyone else or is there some reason why it can’t work here? Or does it not work other places?
I’m still relatively young and have young children, so we have insurance but really have never used it often. I had a pretty bad leg accident late last year that required surgery, first surgery or real medical event in my 38 years. I’ve had stitches a few times and a broke arm as a kid but not much else. Let me tell you, the insurance and medical process is a disaster. I pay a substantial amount of money to insurance annually just to pay another substantial amount if I use the insurance. And the whole billing system is a disaster.
All that to say, I don’t know if universal healthcare is good or bad… or if it could work for America or not. But what I do know is the current system sucks bad. I was fairly indifferent until recently. I’m one of the one the “system” should work for. I at least have a job and can afford insurance. Although I can’t say the insurance really contributed anything to my recent medical event, outside of their negotiated prices with the practice I used, which is another thing that is crap about the system.
This is what worries me when it comes to Universal Healthcare.
https://apnews.com/article/baby-indi-italy-life-support-76b9fdc69b1580ddf3bd971adc23027b
It's a tradeoff but citizens in countries with universal healthcare like having it. They'd never give it up. Ask the elderly to give up Medicare and see what happens. Americans think socialism and immediately become pessimistic and think of the worst possible outcomes when someone mentions universal healthcare. Europeans really have hybrid systems and public and private coexist. The French have the best system in my opinion btw. Also, American docs aren't gonna want to be paid what docs in Europe make. Healthcare prices really are absurd in America although I've had really good insurance for decades and, because I married into the right family, I get taken care of quite well perhaps unlike some others. Europe also has more docs per capital and America limits the number of docs who practice. The AMA is one of the best labor unions around even though it doesn't call itself one. Compare awful outcomes in America with awful outcomes in Europe. You do have some long wait times in Europe but then you could just go to a private facility and pay out of pocket.
Call it what you want, call a hotdog a hamburger if you want. Hell, people with testicles now call themselves women. I know what it is even if it's paid for in different ways and has different "plans."
This subject will be one of Tate’s talking points after CHS retires & he appoints himself to the United State Senate.
You really want to help healthcare in Mississippi? Ban buying Little Debbie’s, Ice Cream, Cokes and McDonald’s with EBT cards.
Depends. There are exceptions to what they count as assets.
If you work, you don't qualify.
If only it were that easy.
How does all of that compare to the private market costs? What makes up the difference?
Every time this comes up, Walmart lobbies to kill it.
This is exactly correct. Medicaid pays about 1/3 of what Blue cross pays the healthcare provider and hospitals. It does not cover the cost of services. Tate did a good thing recently by isolated increasing Medicaid payments to hospitals. I’m not sure if MS can afford to increase the number of lives covered after Tate increased hospital reimbursements.
I am for expansion, just increase the rates at which providers are paid, right now it’s too low.
Stories like that happen in America all the time though. Either private insurance won't pay for it, or the patient doesn't have insurance in the first place. My heart really goes out to the parents, and I would fight just as hard as they did if I were in that situation, but she almost certainly doesn't live any longer if she'd been born in America.
Those big businesses love EBT card carrying Americans. They'll lobby Congress to make sure that stuff is never banned. That stuff will never get banned. Our sugar cane farmers love government support too. That's American capitalism
Expansion does not necessarily give rural hospitals the revenue they need. With Medicaid the money follows the patient. Medicaid also has the lowest reimbursement rate compared to Medicare and private insurance. Yes rural hospitals would have some uncompensated care covered but they need more patients still.
Democrats are all for money following a patient, but fight tooth and nail against money following the student. Republicans are the opposite.
Food for thought and debate.
And the companies that richly profit from selling those products through the EBT system would like to ask you:
Why do you hate our American way of life and FREEDOM?
Lots of thought provoking reasons like this have been presented but all have missed the real reason EBT cards will always buy junk food. Those folks that love to use EBT cards to buy junk food VOTE .
The healthcare system in the US sucks big time. Greatest country in the world my ***. We spend more on healthcare than anyone and get worse care than any wealthy country.
Insurance keeps 48 cents of every dollar. That is a waste of $$&.
Healthcare can remain for profit business provided just eliminate insurance companies from skimming half the money off the top. But but the insurance jobs… labor shortages solved. Those insurance sales people will have to actually work.
Insurance keeps 48 cents of every dollar. That is a waste of $$&.
Healthcare can remain for profit business provided just eliminate insurance companies from skimming half the money off the top. But but the insurance jobs… labor shortages solved. Those insurance sales people will have to actually work.
Does anyone have a list or can they point to a study of all the awful things that have happened to states that have expanded Medicaid? Are those states now unlivable or at least worse to live in than before it happened? If we examined a host of standards of measure for individual well being would we find that states that expanded Medicaid have worse life outcomes and satisfaction for residents than say Mississippi and Louisiana?
I'm not advocating pro or anti expansion but since you asked for studies, this site has some information regarding each state. If you scroll past all of the states there are links to studies, most of which took place between 2014 - 2020.
Status of State Medicaid Expansion Decisions | KFF
This page displays an interactive map of the current status of state decisions on the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion. Additional Medicaid expansion resources are listed (with links) below the map.
www.kff.org
It's not quite as simple as that.
According to the University of Mississippi Medical Center, 70% of households eligible for SNAP benefits travel more than 30 miles to reach a supermarket. Traveling such distances can be expensive for low-income families who are already facing financial struggles.
Navigating food deserts in Mississippi - The Daily Mississippian (thedmonline.com)
And this is where Dollar General and the like have stepped in. Put up a tin building, pay one person to run it, cram it full of whatever you get, and you're closest store by miles with bread.
We already have CHIPS. Not saying that as a reason to not do medicaid expansion, but it's not like we aren't providing healthcare to children that are in families up to 138% of the poverty line already. I think chips is at >200% of federal poverty line, although you may have premiums and copays at the higher end.
I assume this isn't what you meant, but it sounds like you are wanting to essentially offer subsidies so the poor live away from affluent areas?
Medicare was called social insurance so people could pretend they were buying insurance rather than receiving welfare. The Part A "premiums" come nowhere near the cost of providing the healthcare. It's just a lightly means tested welfare program for the elderly.
Nope. Do a little digging. Medicaid does not even cover the actual cost of treatment. Providers lose actual money on every Medicaid patient they see. Explain to me how that is going to save a struggling hospital. This is aimed at the working poor, many of whom have insurance now, albeit not very good insurance. Even those bad plans pay providers better than Medicaid.
There's no reason it can't work here, but it's no panacea.
- it doesn't address the biggest problem we have, which is that we have put a stranglehold on licensing doctors while our population has grown, gotten older, and also picked up a lot of lifestyle diseases that require more healthcare services. We already could reduce medicare costs by just lowering reimbursement rates, but we can't do that because doctors are essentially a cartel. Hospitals will complain that medicare is less than their cost of service, but that cost of service is largely doctors pay, which they can't negotiate down because there are too few of them. You can't basically make them a cartel and expect to be able to shove a lot of price controls on them. A similiar thing is happening on the private insurance side. They keep spending more and more money trying to clamp down on costs, but all they really do is increase the administrative burden and the headache of the hoops that doctor/hospital billing offices have to go through, because at the end of the day, the doctors have the negotiating power because they are a government protected cartel.
- it doesn't change the fact that our healthcare workers are going to get paid more than in other countries simply because their alternatives are higher paying than in other countries. So we're going to pay more than other countries to an extent just because we are a more affluent country.
- We have built our hospital infrastructure up assuming higher costs. I'm not sure we can go into all these hospitals with single person rooms and retrofit them to have larger, multiple occupancy rooms that can be managed with fewer nurses. Ignoring the physical constraints, we have also just built nice expensive buildings in affluent areas. Even when they don't increase operating costs, there's lots of debt associated with them often, and often times it's debt backed by municipalities or counties. There is going to be some pain in transitioning to a lower pay model.
- we pay too much for drugs because we are subsidizing drug development and letting other rich countries free ride off of us. But we have the last semi-market driven model for informing drug development investments/decisions. If we try to move to a monopsony and reduce drug prices, it's going to drastically change the calculus on drug development and there's going to be a lot less money put into it, which will presumably drastically reduce innovation. Some people think that's not a big deal; I think it would be a big deal but it's sort of inherently unknowable.
A model that I think would work is just gradually life the eligibility of medicaid each year. Medicaid would get shittier and shittier for people on it because again, it wouldn't change the number of service providers and more and more service providers would refuse to take it, but eventually you could just have it available for all and people would make a decision as to whether they would rather spend more money on health insurance but get to see a doctor timely or whether they want to take the cheap option and just know that they may have trouble getting care. Or alternatively just pay cash for routine care and know that medicaid is a backup option if they have a catastrophic issue.
I'd prefer us to move more towards allowing a market to actually work, but I don't think that's really in the cards, so this would at least keep a small private market in existence (I think).
And this is another part of the problem. We generally discourage health insurance that is actual insurance as opposed to a prepay plan. People generally think of insurance as "I have insurance, I should have to pay basically nothing in addition to premiums for healthcare". I don't think it would matter that much because of the limitation on the number of doctors, CONs, and restrictions on what services nurses or other non-MD, DO providers can perform, but that is another dysfunctional part of our system that puts upward pressure on prices.
I have been places where the deductible for health insurance was $200 and the max out of pocket for a family was $14,500, and this was for employees where $14,500 would be catastrophic for one year, and two years in a row would almost certainly mean bankruptcy. When I suggested that we should work on getting the max out of pocket under $10k (and ideally more like $7,500), even if it meant a deductible in the thousands, they basically said employees would riot (which I think they were correct). People would rather take that risk in exchange for low routine spending and then just deal with it if they are unlucky enough to have a major medical issue. Which I get; people like to take risks, but it does make the system just that much more 17ed up.
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If you think that it will be cancelable after 28 I have some beach front property in the Tombigbee bottom I'd like to sell you, sight unseen. That would be a political firestorm that no one would survive. Why don't we wait till after 28 and see what happens in the states that did expand it.
There is no such thing as universal healthcare anywhere. What the different systems are about is how care is rationed. No nation on earth can afford everything for everyone.
that is what is being written with very specific details about cancelling it after 28 if it doesnt do what the bill says....it won't be based upon opinion but very specific guidelines.
Ms is looking at Georgia's plan for expansion. George expanded with 2 very important guidelines against what the Fed's wanted: 1. it would be at 100% of the federal poverty level, not 138% as the Fed's want. 2. A work requirement. The Trump admin approved the Ga expansion under these guidelines. The work requirment being the biggest hurdle. Ms plans to do similar if not the same. FWIW, under the Ga expansion, only 2800 folks signed up for Medicaid expansion.
It is most likely going to pass in Ms under what I said earlier, however the Fed's will have to approve the work requirement. It is thought there is only a 50/50 chance the fed passes it with a work requirement in a Biden admin. The thought is MAYBE they will approve it to score a political win in an election year.
It would be wise for us to pass this as it stands, because the ballot initiative is coming sooner or later, and it will be the very first issue to come to a vote.....and it will pass overwhelmingly....so if we want our spin on how we want to do things, what we are staring at now is the best choice.
Didn't they announce Tatorcaid or something last year? Wasn't that going to help the hospitals with emergency rooms or something?
Yes. I was poor once. Most poor people are fine but there's more dysfunction and crime in poor neighborhoods. I'd subsidize. It's cheaper than other options and cheaper than prison. I don't want to live around poor people because of the few who cause problems or just don't take care of their yards and leave shite all around including cars and other crap. Also, I'm not suggesting we don't have healthcare options for poor people. But, as someone posted, it's almost all Deep South states that haven't expanded Medicaid. What does the few Deep South states know that the rest of the country doesn't? Where are the studies on quality of life, standard of living, life span etc that show expanding Medicaid reduces the standard of living or all sorts of outcomes that make states that don't expand it much better off? I'm not interested in the "That ain't right" "that's socialism" types of arguments. Life is about tradeoffs. What's best for most people? I'm also not interesting in excusing personal behavior for keeping people in poverty.
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The biggest welfare recipients are the elderly. The over 55 age cohort is the richest. I'm going to get social security and Medicare along with my other sources of income after I retire. I'm looking forward to taxpayers covering my healthcare expenses and having to pay only a small portion of the actual costs.
Well, usually people aren't that honest. I mean, they are in the sense that they organize their life around avoiding poor people to the extent possible, but mainly they just do this by spending money. They dont' generally in addition express a willingness to subsidize poor people to stay away.
Well, the only major study on medicaid expansion that I'm aware of is one from Oregon showing that medicaid expansion did nothing for people's measured health but that they felt better having it than being uninsured.
The reason you have several deep south states that have not expanded medicaid is partly politics and partly that they are already poor. As mentioned, Medicaid already takes up about 25% of Mississippi's budget. Even the 10% match scares some states. Also, several states, including Mississippi, already have a workforce participation problem. Very few people are going to want to work or to work more if they are facing an implicit marginal tax rate north of 90%. Even if you phase out benefits for one program, the combined benefits available generally make a pretty decent range of income for a family of 4 or 5 subject to those implicit marginal tax rates and adding additional medicaid benefits won't help that.
And facing those facts on the ground does have an impact on politics, although I'm not sure it's as big of an impact as people's priors.
And there is also just the ethical issue. Even if from a self-interested perspective it makes more sense to participate for an individual state, just saying you'll participate in a federal program regardless of how socially destructive it is sets a bad precedent. We're already hurtling towards a sovereign debt crisis. At some point to avoid being Argentina some group of voters has to say they will vote for long term stability rather than just whatever gives me "free" stuff in the short term. That's not a huge factor as politicians basically don't get elected if they think that way, but there is a portion of republican voters that think that way, and a big portion of republicans that vote that way as long as you exclude their pet spending (usually medicare and social security, sometimes farm subsidies, sometimes other smaller programs that just benefit them personally).
You are correct, but what is also correct is the US has a much worse healthcare system.
Almost anyone that gets sick and can’t work will go bankrupt because they no longer can afford insurance and … get it! No matter how good you think u are set up? A few extra hundred grand in bills add up quick when you can’t work and the bills don’t stop.
no tax dollars are 'free' dollars..when a dollar is spent, it comes out of taxpayers pockets..I have no problem with the expansion as long as the work requirement is there..otherwise, we are just increasing welfare more than it is now..a woman with 4-5 children is drawing more of our tax dollars than a person working a good job 40 hours a week..that's just not right..
My aunt would have died Tuesday if Tyler Homes was closed Tuesday in Why-known-Er They stabilized her and started life saving treatments before being choppered to Memphis.
We need rural hospitals dummy
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