Gee I wonder how voters came away with the idea that Medicare for All actually means keep your private insurance. Not like we had half a dozen candidates in the primary who intentionally blurred those lines and lied to the public about what they support.
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Yeah the voters are ignorant on this topic with lots of cognitive biases and ācommon senseā and are easily exploited by wordsmithing. Bernie was terrible at explaining why public option is a cynical phantom decoy when itās something he needed to napalm with the Gutmann method.
Instead, he left a void for Agent Pete who metronomically added āWho Want Itā like a Donāt Forget the Lyrics! contestant. That sounds even better to people who donāt know shit because they think it must be >= M4A since it has M4A but includes other things too. More options > fewer options QED. Distilling the logic reveals people are easily fooled by the illusion of more āchoiceā just as that former insurance CEO Twitter guy has repeatedly previewed.
Thereās also the built-in aversion we have to radical change even if the thing to be jettisoned is toxic waste. I wrote upthread about my mom hesitating to switch to Medicare from private insurance for this exact reason. Her resistance was based on (irrational) fear. The other reason is appeal to moderation which tilts me harder than any other fallacy due to preachy vanilla wafers like Claire McCaskill and Nate Silver who suffer from massive illusory superiority and still run up the middle with eight in the box because it worked in Missouri once.
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Tell people what they want to hear, the pass M4A under the premise that itās better to ask forgiveness than permission. Maybe we should avoid a political full frontal assault on this issue.
Iād ask for a Thank You note.
https://twitter.com/JAMANetworkOpen/status/1346547018991329281
Should have just done Medicaid all the way. The exchanges donāt improve quality over Medicaid and cost more.
If it makes you feel any better Americans, my provider sent my new card to the wrong address (I get one every year) and is now claiming that I am not an EU citizen when I try to get a new one electronically. Thus, I am not eligible for a new card despite the fact that my hospital called to check that I am insured (which of course I am).
I fully expect to not be eligible for a vaccine without a new card. I mean I got an antibody test without a new card (just showed them my old one) but I figure that the government will fuck me over when it comes to getting a vaccine.
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I think weāre missing a critical piece of info here. And that is how much more effective, if at all, the more expensive medicine is than the cheaper one. There is no shortage of examples of more expensive drugs that arenāt any better than cheaper ones.
No matter what, there is a problem somewhere. But without that information, itās hard to pinpoint exactly where it is.
So when he said that the doesnāt always prescribe it, the alternative is to do nothing? Does that actually work? Is this something that will just go away by itself?
If itās untreated does the condition last forever? Does it get worse? How bad is it? Does the medication need to be taken indefinitely or is it just one month and youāre done?
I still agree there is a problem somewhere, but Iām not sure exactly where.
Well that sounds like it sucks. Hope you get better one way or another. Based on about a minute of google it seems like there are a bunch of other (non antibiotic) treatments that can be tried, so it seems a little weird that this guys approach is antibiotic or nothing. Of course, in your particular case, there could be good reasons why those are the only two options.
It looks like the main problem here is that the drug has no generic (in USA) and a patent in place for about another decade. It wouldnāt surprise me if you could could get it online at a reputable Canadian pharmacy for a fraction of the cost (i.e., cheaper than getting here with insurance). Iām just spitballing here, but maybe check it out.
Are you almost done with this shtick or what?
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Not sure what you mean.
There are tons of different problems with the health care system. Sure, they may all end in āVictor has to pay too much for health careā, but the path that takes us there is not always the same. And a good understanding of these problems is necessary to come up with good solutions.
For example, in this case, the popular solution of Medicare for all, wouldnāt really help. A Medicare patient with a supplemental policy for prescriptions would likely be just as fucked. To fix this you would need to fix how drug companies are negotiated with (which would admittedly be easier with m4a) or how patents are awarded. This case is particularly interesting in that regard. The patent was scheduled to expire earlier, but the company managed to game the system and keep it for longer.
I have definitely heard exactly this proposal many times before. I am actually surprised that you havenāt. I do agree that not everyone means the same thing when they say M4A, but at this point I donāt think there are any concrete proposals that are anywhere near congress.
So maybe thatās what you mean. It might even be the more common usage. But itās certainly not a universal meaning.
Single payer doesnāt necessarily imply better patent law, although I will agree that the two are highly correlated when it comes to medications.
I checked a bit after my post and the generic looks quite inexpensive relative to what he would pay here. But my search was pretty half-assed. I donāt even know if the generic is just as good for what heās got. Sometimes (not often) there is a difference.
It isnāt some big mystery what the problem is, so itās weird that youāre doing this raised-by-wolves 20 questions game.
Like I said, if you just want to reduce it to āVictor has to pay too much for health careā, then sure itās no mystery.
But if you care to have an understanding of why exactly it is in a particular instance (and you are under no obligation to care), then youāre going to need to analyze it further.
There seems to be this pattern where someone posts some story of why US healthcare is so obv shitty, which is like a bat signal for you to swoop in and start JAQ to justify why the prices are so high or why the patient should receive a lesser treatment.
I mean I posted something how itās absurd that an ultrasound is $37 in Mexico and $1300 w/ insurance in the US, and that I decided to fly down to Mexico to do mine, your first response was literally āI donāt understand what the complaint is hereā.
I mean, come on.
Anyway Iāll go back to my caveman thinking process of grrr garrggh price so high BAD! Rarghg. You can come up with all the justifications that your complex 4D brain so desires.
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Dafuq are you talking about?
Where did I say what happened to Vic is justified?
Hint: trying to explain where exactly the problem is <> justification.
Sure, if you decide to retcon it and leave out the part of your post that was actually confusing it doesnāt sound confusing at all! Imagine that. In fact, letās see how that conversation ended up after you clarified a few things.
The stupidest part of this is that it would probably even cost the insurance company less money if they just paid for the methadone. Maybe they have an actuary that did the math and it didnāt work out that way. But it sure seems like it would be cheaper to just pay for the methadone.
Being shitty to someone because they think Medicare for all involves giving Medicare to all is shitty. On top of that, it has been used to mean that in the past.
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