Inside the health insurance debate bubble

Sometimes you have to read the right-wing corporate media to get the truth.
For example, while the MSM keeps pushing Obamacare as the alternative to Trump's assault on poor people who need health care, Forbes posted this article.Selection_001_17.png

Yeh. That isn't exactly the narrative on MSNBC and CNN, but the numbers don't lie.

Selection_002_11.png

Where do you think all that money comes from?

Hefty premium increases are the new normal. Americans who shopped for Obamacare-compliant coverage off the exchanges fared just as poorly as those who watched rates soar on the exchanges. The average individual market plan sold through eHealth, an online insurance marketplace, cost $197 per month in 2013. In 2018, the average plan on eHealth was $440 per month — a 123 percent increase.

At the same time the right-wing is equally delusional about health care.
Consider this Forbes article from the same day.
Selection_003_20.png

It's bizarre that they actually think this, but then that's how you get moments like this.

What this translates into is a crisis that neither party (except for Bernie) has a solution to.

Selection_004_8.png

This gave me an idea.
My idea is to look at a nation that recently transitioned to universal health care. That nation is Mexico.
Not only are Americans going to Mexico for medical care by the hundreds of thousands every year, but Americans are doing it at an increasing rate even while Mexico's health care system became more socialist.
mexgdp.png
Note how Mexico achieved this accomplishment without any significant increase in health care costs.
Meanwhile, the political establishment of both parties, the same people who believe that America is the greatest nation on Earth, must think that Mexico is far superior to the United States, because they like to tell us that universal health care here is impossible because Americans are too incompetent.

So the solution is obvious:
Let in migrants from Mexico to run America's health care industry because Mexicans are more competent at it.
[/snark]

Share
up
0 users have voted.

Comments

From the link above

If you casually compare the magnitude of border crossings, the crisis of the US’s for-profit healthcare system becomes apparent. According to US Customs and Border Protection, border crossings of Mexican and Central American refugees — the border crossings Trump and Fox News rage about 24/7 — ranged from 20,000 to roughly 60,000 people per month in 2018. In Los Algodones alone, nearly five times as many American dental refugees are going the opposite way. To get an idea of the absurdity, one could argue there are more people currently fleeing the US’s health care system than refugees seeking asylum from extreme violence and state terror in Central America.

Selection_005_5.png

up
0 users have voted.
Deja's picture

@gjohnsit
My mom did it in the 70s, but I recently advised my brother to do it maybe a month ago. My niece recently found that a dental office she visited had no payment plan option. She could pay the thousands up front, or go away.

Slightly OT: 6 or 8 years back, a dentist told me that the $1000 cap for what dental insurance will pay for orthodontics, has not changed since the 70s.

It's absurd to have to leave the country for healthcare (including prescriptions). Absolutely absurd!

up
0 users have voted.

@Deja That's what I did. I needed a HUGE amount of work.

While I was there, I heard a funny story. A woman needed an operation, and she didn't want to have it done in Mexico, because she thought doctors were so much better in the U.S. She went to the U.S., and the operation was done by - the same Mexican doctor she had rejected, who was called in as the best known doctor for that operation. I don't know if it's fact or fiction, but my brother, who lives down there, holds Mexican doctors in high regard.

up
0 users have voted.
Lily O Lady's picture

These corporations are sucking the life out of the US.

up
0 users have voted.

"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"

the dems have the corporations backs. On health care the dems have our backs. Just to be sure of where to stick the knife in.

up
0 users have voted.
Lily O Lady's picture

@Snode

makes it hard to differentiate. Remember that Dems considered that their job was done when most people had insurance even though it might be sucking them dry leaving no money to seek actual health care.

up
0 users have voted.

"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"

I work in the health care industry, and talk all day long with patients about whether they can afford a co-pay for this drug or that test. My assistant spends a couple of hours a day fighting to get prior authorizations for this or that, which are often declined arbitrarily until the second or third appeal. Formularies for preferred drugs change annually, sometimes more often, and are all but impossible to figure out, so prescribing an inhaler or diabetes pill becomes a crapshoot.

People bitterly complain about their insurance all the time. Sometimes I'll say "Welcome to my world. That's why I'm a single payer guy." Nobody ever argues with that idea.

up
0 users have voted.

Please help support caucus99percent!

More than likely, the sudden appendicitis might well have gone untreated and burst, and a burst appendix costs close to six figures. Besides that we all got medical care for a few years that we qualified by being poor. No co pays, no deductible.

For millions more it's the same, and for further millions the subsidised rates make just having insurance affordable, and no pre existing.

It's not great, but a heck of a lot better than nothing. Yes I know big medical made out like bandits. It's kind of like the Bush Prescription Drug plan for Medicare, a big boondoggle for pharma, but a lot of seniors got drugs.

Big corporations make out like the bandits they are, meanwhile I've got kids and a wife, and it's my responsibility to take care of them.

up
0 users have voted.
Cassiodorus's picture

@ban nock For the folks who are dying of high deductibles? Not so much.

up
0 users have voted.

"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama

@ban nock @Cassiodorus By design. Insurance only helps certain people. The rest of the people get hurt by it.

up
0 users have voted.

@davidgmillsatty
20% is meant to help poor people. 80% is meant for Big Insurance profits.
If you complain about the 80% you are accused of harming the 20%.

up
0 users have voted.
Mark from Queens's picture

Just read the Truthout article.

The irony, that the fake crisis Trump and his duped minions cry in fear about, is really the exact opposite - is so rich. 6000 Americans entering Mexico every day, ostensibly seeking dental care that they can’t afford in America.

Also lost on these malignant morons is the reason for the mass exodus from their native lands to ours, a difficult consideration for anybody under any circumstances. But this requires challenging the deeply penetrated lie of American Exceptionalism, which would require something like extracting teeth from those who cling desperately to this notion.

American foreign policy is at the root of so much of the immigration here. As John Perkins explained we send out our Economic Hitmen to ensure the world is safe for American banking and corporate investment, by entrapping smaller economies, done by saddling countries with unpayable debt, for our imperishable imperialist thirst.

I think you’re right. Shining a light on the shady underbelly that is the insurance stranglehold of how we administer healthcare here, and Bernie is doing an amazing job at this, could be the decisive issue that finally moves the country in a socialist direction. Everybody hates the insurance company nightmare that prevails over so much of our lives, except those who work in that odious industry.

up
0 users have voted.

"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"

- Kurt Vonnegut