I’ve never voted Democrat in my life – but will vote for Joe Biden if I get the chance.
WHY? The only politician I want to “get tougher on” sits in the Oval Office.
And because Bernie and Elizabeth want to spend way more money than we have trying to buy way more medical care than is there to purchase in the first place. (Oh, yeah – the responsible Govt. bureaucracy part is hefty. I get that, but the “way more than there is to buy in the first place” part is still there.)
That said, please give this a think:
A) Europe covers everyone for 10 Equivalent Money Units (10 EMU)
B) The U S spends about 14 EMU per capita and doesn’t cover everyone.
C) Insurors have a 12-month Get Out Of Jail Free written into the law. Cost them money? They forget you ever paid them a dime. Lose your employment due to a major medical event? Become bankrupt and homeless, in way way too many cases.
D) INVERT THE RELATIONSHIP:
i) rewrite the tax code to intercept nearly all 14 EMU, since employers and Medicaid / Medicare spend most of it in the first place
ii) Assign everyone (even the undocumented) a dollar figure representing the likely medical expense for the coming year (cancer, car wreck, lifestyle choices, age, gender, birth order, family history, DNA, and a thousand more “factors”)
iii) then ALLOW an insurer to COMPETE for that person’s care, based on the premise that the appropriate premium is sitting there waiting for them
iv) THE KICKER – on everyone’s birthday they get to fire their insurer and pick some other one.
v) NO copays, NO out-of-pocket, and NO likely increase in current medical outlays.Why no increase? Look at embedded costs we have that Europe doesn’t: large bureaucracies of “denier of first resort” people who say no the first several times you try to make a claim; lavish construction of hospitals and doctors’ offices due to their interest in having the “good payers” pick them; I could go on. What do you think?
Oh, and Another Thing 