Who are the "Extremists" & "Medicare for All Saves $350 Billion"

[amborin]

snippets of miscellaneous postings and articles from correntewire.com:

(send out to Prof. Krugman)


Extremists. You know, the kind of people who justify torture, or hand banksters trillions of dollars at the drop of a hat, or sell out women on abortion, or let a few tens of thousands die so the insurance companies have enough time to work out how to game the system again ... Fringe types. Loons.

http://www.correntewire.com/id_send_one_out_professor_krugman


"Krugman wrote: "For people on the left who think this is all a big nothing, consider the subsidies."

Heh. After the Marx Brothers, we get Seinfeld! As I wrote over at Avedon's place:

Krugman's assuming a can-opener. In this case, that the subsidies will be enough. We know they won't be, for two reasons: (1) the bill doesn't control costs, so the subsidies are always going to lag them, (2) means test + subsidy = welfare, meaning that the precedent for the program is not SS but AFDC, so the program will be under constant assault from "entitlement reformers" in the Dem party rightward.

The problem with these comparisons is that they assume the affected population is composed of people who would have bought insurance without reforms. But the relevant population consists of those who aren’t insured now and likely wouldn’t be in the future. What matters to them is whether they can actually afford the payments they’ll be required to make under the mandate. What they would have paid without reform and mandates is not relevant, because they wouldn’t have bought insurance — they’d be part of the 45-50 million uninsured.

The payments the affected population would be forced to make consist of both the premiums net of subsidies and the out-of-pocket co-payments and deductibles they would have to pay before receiving treatment. That’s a critical piece of what folks like Jon Walker and Marcy Wheeler (see her estimates on affordability) are insisting Congressional Democrats confront and fix. And if some folks can’t afford those payments in 2013-2014, it’s obvious that even more folks would have problems as the costs rise over time, which they are virtually guaranteed to do without sufficient price regulation, provider cost controls and/or competition from a viable public alternative.

The only relevant question for these otherwise uninsured folks is whether they can afford to make the total payments required by the mandates, year after year, given the bill’s weaknesses. If they can’t, then they’re not really "covered," and the mandate is unjustified. They’ll be stuck paying the penalty, and they still won’t have insurance.

Why are subsidies being treated as if they are the answer to all our health care woes, and why has there been little to no questioning of whether it makes any sense at all for the government to shovel billions of dollars into the giant insurance company maw without ever first examining the premium structure - are they fair, do they provide value for the investment, what is preventing them from being artificially jacked up between now and implementation so as to exponentially increase their bottom line? And what happens when it becomes obvious early on that the government will simply not be able to maintain the subsidies?

snip

I feel like Krugman has gone from Shrill to Shill, is lobbying for an Obama administration job, and I fear that he is being set up to be the apologist for the next Obama project: dismantling Social Security and Medicare.

http://www.correntewire.com/krugman_provides_more_fodder_obama_apologists_health_insurance_reform

is to kick lower income people out of the market entirely. everyone knows that they can't afford the premiums, and deductibles even with subsidies. All they have to do is the math - even with subsidies, there is simply no money left over for whatever portion of the premium is left over. For people who make under $30k a year, it's entirely common to spend half of your income just on housing without any existing option of a downgrade.

I think what's being reformed is the ability of people like me to get healthcare. I think they are counting on the penalties to kick people right out of the system. If I'm not able to afford my premium, i'm going to wait until the last possible minute to get health care. The emergency rooms aren't going to be crowded anymore, because going to them may very well mean getting your paycheck garnished - as the IRS does to people who owe back taxes - and that would mean homelessness for a lot of people. So people like me, without sufficient income to actually cover the premiums, will drop out even farther from health care to avoid the entanglement over the government recapturing premiums. I'm going to have to be unconscious to get me to hospital from here on out.

I've come to think of this bill as the "Kill Lori Faster" reform.

In the end, this is Obama sticking it to the working class one more time. He's gambling that since he's proved the Dems don't need the working class anymore to win elections, that the resulting fall out won't hurt. It'll be an ugly day in the class war if he's right.

In California, with mandated auto insurance, over a third of drivers are uninsured. They buy a 3 month premium to bring their registration current, and then drive the rest of the year without insurance. it's how the auto insurance industry gets bad and poor drivers out of the market and transfers the costs associated with them driving to ordinary people. Because if you get hit by one of these drivers, your rates are going up.

Provisions permitting insurers and companies to more than double charges to employees who fail “wellness” programs because they have diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol readings, or other medical conditions.

Insurers are permitted to sell policies exempting patient protections passed in other states. Insurers will thus set up in the least regulated states in a race to the bottom threatening public protections won by consumers in various states. ...

Insurers can charge four times more based on age plus more for certain conditions, and continue to use marketing techniques to cherry-pick healthier, less costly enrollees.

Insurers may continue to rescind policies for “fraud or intentional misrepresentation” – the main pretext insurance companies now use to cancel coverage.

http://www.calnurses.org/media-center/in...


Meanwhile.....

Just where does "Medicare for all would save $350 billion" come from?

Why, from Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein, cofounders of PNHP, of course!

The short answer is that they found, in a study published in 2003, that the US spends about 31% of its health care dollars on administration and Canada spends about 16.7% of their health care dollars on administration .

Which means that we are spending 14.3% of our health care dollars on what is probably useless administration, and they feel that this is a low estimate. Fine-tuning the estimate a little bit yields a difference of about 15.6%.

Since most of Canada's health care financing is publicly administered and only some of our health care financing is publicly administered and a goodly portion is privately administered , they attribute this extra 15+% to the blood-sucking leeches health insurance industry.

So, now we can do a little simple arithmetic. In 2007, our total national health expenditure was estimated to be $2.24 trillion; 15.6% of that would be $349 billion .

The forecast NHE for 2009 is roughly $2.5-2.6 trillion; 15.6% of that would be $390-405 billion, which is why you'll sometimes see people, Bernie Sanders for one, saying we could save $400 billion if we just dump the private insurance companie.

[xchrom]

1. Recommend

[Edweird]

2. Yep.

[Demeter]

3. I Think Krugman Has Never Known Health Insurance Hell

and without any practical reality exposure, he can blithely make ridiculous arguments supporting this abortion of a bill.

[eridani]

4. Better health care for less money by eliminating useless parasites

--fringe all the way for sure.

[girl gone mad]

5. Krugman was about the only liberal economist who supported the TARP ram through.

Stiglitz, Galbraith, Roubini, Taleb, Simon Johnson, Nomi Prins, and pretty much everyone else on this side of the aisle was dead set against it. Come to think of it, I don't recall one other reputable macroeconomic expert who wasn't deeply unhappy with at least some aspect of that bill. Krugman's support may have been grudging, but he was much more willing to fall for the Fed's games than were others.

I still admire and respect him, though I think he is prone to give more trust to institutions and entrenched power than their past actions merit.

[glitch]

6. "he is prone to give more trust to institutions and entrenched power than their past actions merit"

Well said. He's a very bright guy, but possibly too nice and far too trusting.