General Politics Discussion (VI) [ARCHIVED] • Page 1784

I dunno, I think it’d be mildly amusing to watch Trump get super pissed about Bezos buying an NFL team when he was pretty much told to go kick rocks when he tried.

 

Not that there are any good nfl team owners to begin with

 

I feel like we deserve the timeline where Trump loses Kim Kardashian and that somehow triggers a butterfly effect

 

Lol this is like when sportswriters get mad after falling for a tweet from @BonerGod69 saying that LeBron was traded to Memphis

 

goddamn I love Haberman getting dunked on

 

jfc

 

Love to get the daily reminder that the most powerful person in the world is absolutely certifiable.

 

It'd be nice for more people to realize he literally doesn't care and won't be held accountable.

 

What’s the process for impeaching a senator

 

Pretty sure like the exact same ...

 

It's literally making it a harder angle to poop from

 

To a lot of people, $5000 is pretty much the same as $100,000.

 

It's really, really not. I can't emphasize enough how different those two amounts are, especially when it comes to medical bills.

That's not to say it's affordable for a lot of people, but one of those is literally instant financial ruin and the other is way more likely to be manageable.

My wife just had a baby and had complications and the baby had to stay in the NICU. $120,000 charged bill. If we didn't have our insurance but instead had a silver level plan from the marketplace, a $5000 OOP maximum with that plan vs. no insurance at all and a $120,000 bill would be a huge, huge, huge difference in financial outcomes for us.

 

I get they're the not the same amount, just saying, that for someone that is paycheck to paycheck, an extra medical bill is unrealistic to pay toward regardless of the full amount. Whether the monthly amount is $100 or $500, doesn't make a difference. Of course $5k is more manageable than $100K...

 

Squatty Potties should be in every bathroom in the world.

 

$5k is literally instant financial ruin for lots of people

 

I personally know people that can’t save more than $500 a month. How can you save enough to pay that bill?

 

A payment plan for $5000 is going to be a lot less per month than one for $120k would be

 

The psychology alone behind knowing you have to pay off $5000 vs. knowing you have to pay off $120000 is a bit different.

Most people aren't going to have $5000 up front. But a monthly payoff plan for that is like you went out to Nucar and bought a used car for no money down. A monthly payoff plan for $120K is going to be, as some folks here with student loans can attest to, more than your rent per month.

If I were faced with 120K I'd basically be looking to declare bankruptcy ASAP.

 

Yeah but we're talking about different degrees of poor now.

Being underinsured doesn't help everyone, but it sure as shit helps a lot of people who, if otherwise uninsured, would have no hope of affording it, but do have hope now.

Of course just having everyone covered for every single thing for no OOP cost would be better than what we have now, but no health care system around the world works like that, and even Bernie people are admitting that we're not going to get his M4A bill as proposed. So it's worth actually talking about what a public option could/will look like, and to avoid just making declarative statements about how a public option will just leave people with a $5000 uncovered medical bill when most systems around the world do generally avoid large bills like that despite not being "M4A" as proposed.

In fact, considering that that is kind of the system of we have now with the individual market (high deductibles and OOP maximums around $5000) it's hard to believe that any plan put forward by any of these candidates would leave that in place considering the idea is to "improve" upon the ACA. The main way you "Improve" the ACA at this point is addressing those high deductibles and OOP maximums. Biden's whole talking point is a public option would force insurers to drive down their own prices and cost sharing to compete, so it stands to reason that whatever bill actually gets written is going to have to provide better coverage than private insurance currently is to accomplish that. Otherwise the govt provided plans would just be the same thing as the private plans and no actual 'improvement' is made.