Another pro-Medicare For All poll

Over and over again, the media, Joe Biden, and the rest of the corporate Democrats tell us how people love their private health insurance. What people actually love is their doctor.

Over 59% of respondents who receive health insurance through their employer said in a new INSIDER poll they would be fine if that plan changed, as long as it meant no change in coverage.

Here's how the support broke down:

44% of people said they were on an employer-based plan. Of them, 41% love their plan, 20% don't like their plan, and 39% would be fine if it changed as long as they kept coverage.
28% were on Medicare, Medicaid or military coverage. Of them, 57% love their plan, 14% don't like their plan, and 29% would be fine if it changed as long as they kept coverage.
12% directly purchased health insurance. 39% love their plan, 22% don't like their plan, and 39% would be fine if it changed as long as they kept coverage.

This poll from this week looks a whole bunch like this other poll from a month ago.

mfa1.png

But corporate Democrats suddenly care about the private insurance that labor unions provide.
Even Politico has called bullsh*t on that.

Joe Biden and other moderate Democratic candidates opposed to “Medicare for All” have cast the plan as anti-labor, arguing that it would leave union members worse off by stripping them of the health care benefits they painstakingly negotiated.

But not all labor unions agree.

Only a few major unions have come out against the single-payer system that would all but eliminate private insurance, while many others remain undecided and some of the biggest labor groups in the country have embraced the plan.

Those supporting Medicare for All — or at least not yet ruling it out — say health care increasingly dominates contract battles, consuming bargaining power that could instead be directed toward raising wages and improving working conditions.

Share
up
0 users have voted.

Comments

The thing is ... different people have different needs. If you're 28, with no kids, and you have a plan that lets you see your doctor once a year, and whenever you've got a sinus infection, sure, you "love" your plan -- what's not to love?

I hypothesize that the people who don't love their plans are the ones who need more than an annual checkup, an Rx for antidepressants or statins, and the occasional round of antibiotics. The first time your kid breaks an arm and you discover you're on the hook for hundreds of dollars in deductibles and co-pays, for example, can maybe switch you really quickly into the "not so much love" category. Maybe people whose 20-something offspring are still on Mom's employer plan, but it's an HMO with no services in the state where said offspring live -- maybe those people are less than satisfied.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that there's a really, really big gulf between the nature of "loving your employer health plan" and "not liking your employer health plan" -- a gulf defined by the healthcare you need.

up
0 users have voted.

The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

Alligator Ed's picture

Two factors will determine whether patients get to retain their physician and/or transfer to new ones. One factor is if M4A retains an HMO model, i.e., gatekeeper model. In which case supplicants for health maintenance/restoration are at the mercy of networks. They also have to jump through more hurdles than those whose Medicare is on the PPO system, which has much less stringent requirements for authorization. Most PPO-type plans let people choose specialists themselves, something which cannot be done under the HMO model.

A further point regards physicians' choices as to whether participation in certain networks, applicable to HMO models. Rates of reimbursement as well as bureaucratic hurdles affect this choice greatly.

Under the Unaffordable Care Act, Obummer lied through his pearly white teeth about this. Keep your own doctor--pshaw!

Now there are as many variations on the Medicare theme as there are candidates, which perforce includes the establishment.

up
0 users have voted.

It covered everything no deductible no premiums ten dollar co pay, good docs who were incentivised to keep me well. The insurance carrier was the medical provider. Kaiser. Lab, xray, specialists, all in the same building.

Plus our experience with Medicaid via the ACA was not so great. Coverage was there but it could be yanked at any time and was at the whim of a ten dollar an hour overworked employee of a multinational who manages things like medicaid for states. My state managed Medicaid horribly. They had many left over vestiges of the time when they did everything in their power to keep anyone from getting medicaid. So govt health care wasn't so great.

Then we got private insurance through my wife's union job.

I've had two major operations with hospital stays lately, didn't even have a co pay. Zero.

My wife convinced me about Medicare for all. With Medicare for everyone there won't be any worries about her keeping her job for the insurance. It will probably drive down the price of care. My worry is that the upper middle class will hike the taxes of the working class beyond what we would have paid otherwise. Remember, the ACA wasn't so great for many working class people.

My ideal would be socialist medicine. Govt pay checks for docs and govt owned hospitals. Medicare for all is a step in the right direction. Plus that cadillac insurance was valued at $27K per year, that's pre tax deduction. That's a heck of a lot of money for some people to get in society and others not.

I'm pro medicare for all, for now, still afraid someone is going to lecture me about my "privilege" and we either won't have care or it will be too expensive. It all depends on how it's structured.

up
0 users have voted.

@ban nock
as you got with your private insurance from Kaiser. Often when you hear such stories it turns out that it was excellent coverage mainly because you didn't need very much from it -- if someone had become chronically ill, for example, you might have seen your premiums shoot up. But that's pure speculation.

Like you, I currently have cadillac employer-sponsored insurance that costs me almost nothing, only a relatively insignificant (compared to my salary) employee contribution. Well, except now it does more, because one of my grown kids who has no employer insurance moved to Florida for work, so I had to switch to the plan that allows us to go out of network. Now there are more copays and some deductibles and stuff. This is one of my pet peeves of the current US system -- if I have to worry about getting some kind of brutal bill because I break my leg while on vacation out of state, then I'm not satisfied, and i wonder how many people who "love" their plans have ever even given something like that a moment's thought.

Several months ago I posted something about an article somewhere (Salon, maybe), where the journalist had solicited people's benefits statements. She ended up reviewing hundreds of the things. The biggest shockers were the ones where someone was taken -- sometimes unconscious -- to the nearest hospital, and woke up with tens of thousands of dollars in uncovered charges, because that hospital didn't "accept" their insurer. Okay, bruh -- do you "love" your plan now?

up
0 users have voted.

The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

The insurance plans that people have are NOT related to who their doctors are or which hospitals they can go to (unless the plan restricts them). So when people claim that citizens don't want to give up their private insurance plans, they are pulling the wool with the public. People are generally satisfied with their doctors and a Medicare for ALL plan would not change who they get to see. In fact, it would EXPAND that list.

They apparently think we are stupid.... which we are sometimes, but not with this. The polls show that people know that medicare works pretty well for those they see who are on it.

up
0 users have voted.

"Without the right to offend, freedom of speech does not exist." Taslima Nasrin

Wouldn't it be nice if pollsters polled what is being proposed, instead of donor talking points blah blah blah etc.?

Here are the only two damn bills that at are actually really truly called "Medicare for All":

Senate version, Bernie Sanders' damn law: S.1129 - Medicare for All Act of 2019

House version, Pramila Jayapals damn law: H.R.1384 - Medicare for All Act of 2019

Those bills will have to be reconciled to death before President Sanders signs the damn things in to law, so wouldn't you want to be specific about what you are supporting exactly? I would.

Wouldn't it be great if M4A supporters actually quoted the parts of the damn bill they like, compared to e.g. the other bills, and why? I think so. good luck

PEACE

up
0 users have voted.