General Politics Discussion (VI) [ARCHIVED] • Page 1785

i get what you're saying here but when you literally don't have the ability to save any money, paying off any bill in the thousands is liable to cause a huge psychological toll, which (i think lol) is the point we're trying to get at here.

obviously a $5k bill is much better than a $120k bill. the issue is that for many middle and lower-class people, even $5k is too much. to put it in the context of a used car, there are lots of folks who can't afford that, or really struggle to.

 

Yes the first paragraph really put into words what I couldn’t.

 

Of course there are, but on the other hand there are a lot of folks who couldn't afford it before hand because used cars would cost 9, 10, 11K out of pocket and now because of the new law capping it at 5K, they can.

Point being, even if the public option that eventually gets passed has some out of pocket costs (as it almost assuredly will), it's disingenuous to say that any non-M4A plan is just killing people, and to throw around random figure like $5000 as a possible bill when, presumably, our system would be modeled off of other already existing systems that work very well around the world but arent' M4A, is a dishonest argument to make. A lot of countries with what we over here call "single payer" have cost sharing, and it's not an evil thing to do. Germany's got a 10% co-insurance fee IIRC

 

lol

 

I’m a teacher with student loan debt and a baby so no, I will not be shirting the fuck up.

if you want to pretend I’m saying you’re not allowed to feel stress from a $5k medical bill than you can take that shit somewhere else because you know that’s not what’s being said and you’d rather just go for the “dunk”.

But if you wanna go down more personal anecdotes road, one of my groomsmen had some bones in his neck fused after a car accident while uninsured. Medical bills north of 150k. Forced to declare bankruptcy. Still has horrible credit because of it. He’s been working 2-3 jobs for the last 5 years to try and save up cash since he can’t get credit for anything. Yeah, I’d say a $5000 OOP
maximum would have, uh, made a huge fucking difference in his life.

 

David, 120k is a lot more than 5k. But it’d be a lot easier to pay off 120k when compared to a bill of $3 million. but I’m not going to spend a second arguing that 120k isn’t bad because it’s not $3 million.

 

pretty sure everyone (here) agrees there ought to be a maximum. I think that $5k is still too high for that maximum.

 

A very bad comparison because the amount of people that can afford 120K but not 3 million is a lot smaller than the amount of people who can afford 5K but not 120K. 5K is roughly 1/6th of the average annual income in the United States. You’re literally helping a shit ton of people even if you did nothing else but cap OOP spending at 5k.

It feels relatively safe to say that whatever public option we got would have less cost sharing than 5K OOP maximums. Even the most conservative plan (Biden’s afaict) would have to offer better options for consumers if it wants to drive down prices in the private insurance market. Most of the other plans presented are more even more aggressive than Biden’s though.

 

Nice, now whenever I eat pork this will come to mind

 

Oh I agree it should be less, but I’ll still point out how helpful even something that high can be.

but I also haven’t seen any evidence to suggest a public option under even a Biden admin would keep cost sharing that high. Obviously they’re just white papers at this point though so hard to get into more details when there aren’t any there. I’m just going off what we already know about the ACa exchange plans and what a public option would have to be to drive the prices of those private plans down, which is Biden’s stated goal

 

Okay, how about that brain tho?

 

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