Re: “The US Likely Has 8 Years—At Most—Before Crisis”

On Sat, 21 Jun 2025 22:57:20 -0500, Lynn McGuire
<lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:

On 6/21/2025 4:59 PM, Scott Lurndal wrote:

Lynn McGuire <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> writes:

>
Means testing Medicare will throw a bunch of people like me, middle
income, into the valley of no health insurance.  Throwing us onto
Obamacare is just another cost to the feddies.

 
Perhaps you might consider eliminating the vast overhead of
the insurance companies, physician holding companies and
pharmacy benefits managers that consume better than 50%
of every healthcare dollar spent.   Pure overhead with
absolutely no benifit.
 
Setup a single payer (perhaps like the post office) and
simplify the billing infrastructure.   Save tons of money.

>
What is the biggest Single Payer system on the planet ?  Canada with 40
million people ?
>
Will that work for 350 million people ?
>
BTW, Single Payer is the same as Medicare for all.  Given that 67
million people are on Medicare in the USA at the moment, expanding that
to 100% of the citizens may or may not work.  Will all doctors accept it
or will they quit / retire ?  This would be a heck of an experiment.

It is strange to see you channeling Bernie and Hillary.

Medicare for All would still have the various supplemental plans
available. The Bernie/Hillary solution would not -- you are correct
about their solution being a single-payer system in Medicare for All
clothing. But calling it "Medicare for All" does not make it Medicare
for All.

This confusion of terms is one reason why I think we need two /new/
political parties, as both the major parties are simply not working.
This is more obviously true of the Republicans, dominated by MAGA, but
the Democrats are failing as well.

77 million people in the USA are on Medicaid.  Given that 3 million
people word for the feddies with an average of two dependents (SWAG) and
1 million work for DOD with an average of two dependents (SWAG).  So the
USA government is already covering 67 + 77 + 3 * 3 + 1 * 3 = 156 million
people for healthcare.  That is a large portion of the USA population.

You do realize that State monies are used with Medicaid as well as
Federal, right?

When I was a kid growing up in Oklahoma in the 1960s, we had free
clinics all over the place.  My mother used those extensively for
vaccines and sniffles.  Those free clinics seem to have gone away.

Maybe you should investigate who funded them -- governments or
non-profit organizations.

BTW, two of the underlying problems are:

1) The USA does not have a "medical system". It has a "medical
industry" with a gazillion independent business organizations, each
trying to maximize profits.

2) In the USA, "medical insurance" does not exist. The whole /point/
of insurance is that most of those who pay in never see any payout
because they never have a covered loss. Even life insurance is based
on many people paying this year who will not die this year. Yet the
only success the Republicans had with the ACA has been to reduce the
penalty for not joining it when young to 0, thus causing it to cease
to be insurance.

There may, of course, be others. The heavy reliance on drugs, for
example.
--
"Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"