USA dead last in healthcare

US is also 36th in the world, so it's not like they have great healthcare compared to other first world countries

Indeed it is. Context is of course important though, and in that same CBO report they predict that roughly another 30 million of the uninsured will have health insurance by 2023. That's an unprecedented accomplishment no matter how you slice it. You were never going to solve the problem that is American health care with one piece of legislation, there's too many special interests involved to ever be able to do that, but Obamacare is the necessary (and monumental) first step in having a more efficient and more ethical health care system.

Please then point me to the CBO report where it says that due to population size and insufficient wealth that it is impossible for the US to create a universal health care system through the private sector.

I never said it was impossible to create healthcare through the private sector only that the ACA isn't the healthcare option that does that and it hasn't shown to do even remotely what they have in Switzerland.

At least Obama is trying. Health Care is a huge problem here, and I'm glad he did something to try and stop the problem. Whether it works or not, I'm willing to support it.

What you did say is that Obamacare is a health care system unlike anything else in any other industrial country. That's demonstrably not true. The way Obamacare works is pretty simple - it's based on three interconnected principles. The first being that Insurance companies can't discriminate based on pre-existing conditions. Because of that, everyone has to buy health insurance. Since everyone has to buy health insurance, the government has to subsidize the purchase of health insurance. That's the heart of Obamacare, and it is also the heart of the Swiss system. The reason why the Swiss system works so much better than the US system right now has nothing to do with population size or average income, it has to do with the fact that Obamacare is brand new and the Swiss system has been around for a while. There's not one example of a social welfare program that was perfect right out of the gate. When social security was first introduced it had a ton of problems as did medicare, but look at them today and they are very successful in doing what they were created to do. That would've never been the case if the people of those times rejecting making that crucial first step because the original legislation wasn't a silver bullet.

If you make the perfect the enemy of the good you will never get anything done ever.

I think a big failure in our healthcare overhaul was keep insurance companies in the system, they're there to make profit for themselves and not to look out for the best interest of their clients, they make more money on inefficiency and not negotiating lower costs to consumers. In a very basic sense, let's for the sake of argument say a healthcare plan costs $100/month, 20% or $20 per person of that can be kept by the insurance company for administrative costs and 80% or $80 per person will have to be paid out on claims benefit expenditures for the insured... well, there's a simple way to increase profits, and that's to raise the costs associated with healthcare and be complicit with inefficiency and higher costs for care and drug prices, because then the monthly premiums would increase, and therefore their 20% goes up. This is broken because it wants for profit companies at the helm, rather than either a single payer system or a government insurance program that could negotiate lower costs because it isn't beholden to capitalist incentives. Furthmore, during the overhaul conservatives fought to allow insurance companies the privileged to do what's illegal in any other industry, and that's to meet in private and negotiate price fixing. This allows them to raise their premiums in unison so they all profit, so one company doesn't undercut the others and take the all the business away. That also needs to be one of the first things to go away.

What are you even talking about? Congress didn't water anything down. Democrats had a majority. They easily passed Obamacare with little to no input from Republicans. Of course Republicans have been shitting on this bill. It's a bad bill. I'd shit on it too if I was an elected representative.

The fact of the matter is Obamacare is a bad bill. You were wrong in attempting to say it was the best thing we've passed in a decade, or whatever. I've shown you why you're wrong and you only seem to be capable of straw mans and other logical fallacies. Maybe you should stay away from OT until you learn the basics.

you're kidding right? Republicans even tried to repeal Obamacare after it was passed...

This is complete revisionist history. Passing Obamacare wasn't "easy" at all, especially once Scott Brown was elected. It had to be watered down considerably to get conservative democrats to vote for it in both houses (the senate more so). Then the final product was watered down even more by the fact that the house was forced to pass the senate bill wholesale because of the aforementioned election of Scott Brown in the senate making it possible for republicans to filibuster any bill that would've emerged from conference.

Eh..the actual care itself is at the top. It's the cost that does that....on the other hand...you get what you pay for as well.

Someone who get's it! Thank you!

Translation: "A like-minded liberal who agrees with me"

lol

man do you seem to love bathing in ignorance

I guess it's true though, reality does have a liberal bias

everything in my post is a verifiable fact

and please, don't call me a liberal, I'm much farther to the left than that

I figured this, but I was giving you the benefit of the doubt.

Actually i am not a liberal, but a liberal in US is right wing conservative in Europe. So i am not in the sense you would consider it.

So the commonwealth fund ranked the UK as number 1 in healthcare? How incredibly unbiased

the commonwealth fund is a private foundation based in the US

The intellectual property model relevant to the pharmaceutical industry and the problem with medical liabilty suits are both not an american phenomenon. what I got from the video is that they're worried about the american healthcare market being ranked last in some report.

This is drivel. I remember watching in dread as this thing passed. It was not as hard as you make it out to be.

Are you trolling or just insanely stupid? America pays the most per capita for their healthcare. That's right you pay the most yet have the worst.

It's an undeniable fact that a universal healthcare system is better than the crap they have in America.

Then you obviously you weren't paying attention very closely. The first health care legislation that was introduced in the house was the "Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act" on January 26th, 2009 but died in committee. The next bill to be introduced was the "America's Affordable Health Choices Act" that was introduced in July the same year. That too died in committee. It wasn't until the "Affordable Health Care for America Act", introduced in October of that year did the house pass a health care bill at all, and even then it only passed with a difference of 5 votes.

But this wasn't even the bill that got signed into law. To find that you'd have to go to the senate to find the Affordable Care Act, which was introduced in November and passed without a vote to spare on the very last day congress was in session in 2009. Then in early 2010 Scott Brown won in Massachusetts and health care reform looked pretty much dead. The senate no longer had the votes necessary to pass any health care reform bill that came from conference and democrats had strong doubts that they could pass the senate bill in the house unaltered. Democratic leadership seriously considered abandoning reform all together; it was only due to extremely creative parliamentary tricks in the house that Pelosi able to get the senate bill passed, again by a margin of 5 votes.

If you don't like Obamacare that's fine, but you don't have to lie and act like it was a breeze to get through congress.

@-Sun_Tzu-: Don't forget that states have refused to implement it and senators have tried reppealing it several times after it passed

Not only that but the supreme court was a vote shy of striking down the law all together. In fact reports since have suggested that John Roberts originally had voted with what eventually became the dissent but eventually changed his vote.

It's well known that some of the supreme court people have no idea about some matters, because they base it on their beliefs rather than common sense. Just look at Citizens United

Is that so.

@thegerg: They're not the ones making the money, it's the companies with the patents. Why do you think Polio is gone? Because it was free for everyone

yeah I'm not watching the video

lol you guys suck at healthcare.

Yup, indeed they do

The obvious answer is the privatize all of health care. Free market FTW.

Yes it is, everyone has access to the vaccine

I'm chronically ill (cancer), so I can speak from a patient's perspective here.

I'm with Kaiser, and I receive wonderful medical treatment. I have everything I need, everything is provided for and my co-payments are nil. I take a lot of meds, do injections for myself that cost thousands of dollars, have had experimental treatment and constantly have MRIs and procedures that are covered. I'm under Quest and numerous other programs of assistance. I'm HUGELY grateful for the quality of healthcare I receive, at least where I'm at. Do the people that claim the U.S.'s healthcare poor actually even use it? Shit, the only thing that could make mine better would be having a hot masseuse come over every night to tuck me in.

Now, if I ever lax on my coverage I'm sure I'll never again get covered, but the quality of the coverage when I am is more than fine by me.

I didn't say people weren't paid, but the patent was free

uhm, yes it was. Same with penicillin

Link

@thegerg: Which means he gave it away for free and didn't really earn anything from it

He could have easily just made a patent on it and made billions

Well jeez, that's terrible. Not so bad up here in Canada with our "maple syrup chugging assess," is it?

Well if you invent something and you don't take money for it, it's basicly free minus the cost for staff and the resources

@thegerg: Yup, because he never filed a patanet on it. Many companies do it nowadays