Even if the government gives us $20,000 to buy health insurance, premiums will likely increase by $20,000.
Now now, why would you only increase it by the amount the government will give you, you clearly dont have what it takes to be a CEO. If everyone would get 20k. Increase the price to 25k
Bingo. Socializing profits or whatever this is called…”neoliberalism” “private public partnerships” is exactly what destroyed everything good about western society.
This is just a roundabout way of subsidizing the health insurance industry while making his base think he actually did something for them.
No that’s the ACA. This is just peanuts.
Every subsidy that goes to a person basically is a roundabout way to fund an industry. Even tax write offs are. Like a mortgage interest rate deduction just helps banks and the real estate industry, not the people buying a house. The write off pushes housing prices up, since the banks can give out slightly higher mortgages to borrowers and the market adjusts to the bigger inflow of cash and supply doesn’t increase faster. If the write off didn’t exist people could borrow less but houses would cost less as well. This basically happened in my country the Netherlands. Nobody benefited from the introduction of the mortgage interest deduction except the banks and people who already owned a home when the policy was introduced.
My dudes, we have nothing to lose but our chains
The health insurance plans will just raise their prices by another $2000
I wouldn’t expect anything else from a Trump Policy - everything he does is to feather the nests of his wealthy supporters. I guarantee this trump-care policy was suggested and supported by health insurers.
Of course. It didn’t change anything and it’s unrealistic.
This is the biggest lesson I’ve learned in adulthood. As a high schooler I said many things like “just go fix it”.
Problem is there’s always someone who will happily take advantage and ruin something that should be a good thing.
Adding $660,000,000,000 to the federal deficit annually and still not making a dent in people’s healthcare costs?
A single-payer universal healthcare system would be cheaper, as almost every other country’s systems show.
The real trick is to get private equity and for-profit corporations out of healthcare. All they do is drive up costs while lowering outcomes.
Healthcare should be a public service, funded by the government.
Yeah, the US actually pays more PUBLIC funds per person than most other nations. Then the private cost on top - all for worse health outcomes.
We need more Luigis just from a financial perspective.
as almost every other country’s systems show
You can take out the “almost” here. Literally every other country on Earth pays half or less per capita than what we pay in the US, and this has been the case for decades.
UNH, CVS, ELV and CI share holders disagree with you and thanks to the SCOTUS Citizen United decision they have to money and the legal framework to legally bribe politicians. I’ll suggest to invest in those companies rather than flight them.
I’m not contributing to evil companies. “If you can’t beat them, join them” does not apply when they’re responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths a year and putting millions of people in poverty.
People willing to do anything to get rich is precisely the problem in this country, and I’m not going to be a part of it.
You’re right about Citizens United, though. It should be revoked.
How can there still RELATIVELY many people be able to have kids financially? The fertility rate in most european countries in comparison is lower, although we have affordable healthcare (well, compared to the US at least).
Why do you think they’re trying to shut down reproductive rights? They want people to have kids despite financial capability to raise them. As long as they survive growing up, they’ll labor.
And be raised by parents who don’t have any financial independence, ensuring they’re also in debt slavery for the rest of their lives.
Things feel so dystopian that I get the feeling that after they get everyone on debt slavery that they’ll put propaganda about how it’s unfair that debt is absolved on death and that your family/kids should pay for it. Fox News will be like: “why should a company’s debts just disappear? it’s unfair to the lender!”
Hey, someone is going to have to do all those below-subsistence jobs that the deported immigrants have been doing.
In an ideal world that’s what robots/AI would do. But we get the opposite; artists become unemployed whereas manual labor still continues to exist for humans.
It’s one healthcare, Michael. What could it cost? $2000?
Damn you beat me to it! Take your upvoter and be proud…
Brilliant!
Remember when they unveiled “the plan” many years ago? Huge stacks of paper, it looked very comprehensive indeed.
Of course, all the pages were blank. IT WAS TOP SECRET, YOU SEE, INVISIBLE INK!
Now, I’m wondering what was on the other 20K pages after the “$2000 credit a year” page. That was invisible. Eight years ago? Ten? I hate it here
ETA $2000 will be worth $20 by 2027. We should print more money to fix that!
Circuses are cheap, bread is expensive
Not in America, you just add more sugar to make it cheap
Absolute circus.
I feel like there should still be 13 stripes
It’s the 9 original colonies that didn’t vote for Trump in 2024.
Edit: I made that up
(the white stripes also count)
Duum dudum dum dum duuuum duum
Same. I like the image, but the last two red stripes are inaccurate, and superfluous. We didn’t have 17 or 18 colonies, we had 13.
You didn’t have any colonies, the British did.
My Great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, who owned and sold 2/3 of Virginia at the time might disagree.
I want a refund
Oh wow! In switzerland there is immense political pressure beause health insurance is very expensive.
I pay 6300 per year.
I’ve got a “Cadillac” plan in Spain, which for a family of 4 is about 5K a year. No copays or anything. Occasionally I’ll have a prescription which will cost €20, and the farmacist will get angry on my behalf.
In the US, we were paying $25,000 (pretax) in premiums for a meh plan with copays at every turn.
I love that.
In Canada the eyecare industry is a capitalist hellscape. We just got national dental care and now the opticians and eye doctors are jealous and revolting against their own system because people are buying their contacts and glasses online and not going to the eye doctor. Less and less people have jobs that cover eye care so the ones I talk to want their industry socialized like everyone else’s in the health industry.
Mind giving more detail? Who is the insurance provider and how did you sign up?
In Spain? I moved to Spain, and use Sanitas. My bank offers additional benefits since I signed through them - but honestly, as an American, they could be overcharging me massively and I’d never notice.
In Spain, yeah. Sanitas seems like a popular option for visa holders. The cost seems amazing, one year is about what I’d pay per month in the US.
Is that all inclusive, or do you pay additional costs when things happen?
The distinction here is important- $26K is premiums which is money that goes to the insurance companies. You will end up paying more than that with co-pays, deductibles, etc.
So this is including the deductibles. Ater that there still is 10% in co-pay. But that is really not that much.
Usually all inclusive from what Ive heard from others. Problem is wait times. But if it’s not life threating, you’re waiting anyways in the US. United States healthcare is dominated by insurance lobbyist. Fear mongering Republicans keep the system up.
Isn’t that basically universal basic income?
If he does it the proper way yes, but it’ll probably be something stupid and strictly controlled to be only insurance
Also ignoring the fact that even if it was $2000 annually no strings attached that still does little, though it would certainly be welcome
Health insurance would magically become $2k more expensive overnight, so
Typical NYC slumlord style: “Free first months rent.”
I looked at an apartment once which was the upstairs of a house. Dogs had eaten large chunks out of the bedroom doors and there were two giant piles of dog shit left in the kitchen. The owner was enormous and unable to climb stairs so she hadn’t seen the state of the place after the previous tenants had moved out. After I told her what the situation was, she said if I cleaned it up myself she would knock off $200 … from the security deposit. Get fucked.
His daddy was exactly that. A slumlord. Rotten apple from a rotten tree
Why does the health insurance industry even exist?
That’s a question Americans are prevented from having because it would offend Ayn Rand or something.
Because “value” must be created and extracted, doesn’t matter if that means people can’t afford insulin
Those poor corpos won’t be able to afford to sex traffic kids without those billions of dollars.
People are very bad at setting aside small amounts of money to save for large purchases. Especially when that purchase is “one day I might get real sick”. That is insurance.
But that is also taxes, so we should just pay those and get healthcare for free.
It’s also hard to put away like - well I had $330k of surgeries for a spontaneous pneumothorax about 15 years ago - most people will definitely not experience that. I was in my 20s. Who could save that much by then?
So yeah everyone else in the state paid a little more to cover my bills. By the same token, when God gives a 6yo leukemia (his ways are mysterious lol) I pay a little more to cover her treatment. And by the same token, when someone is lucky enough not to be chosen by God for either of these experiences (hallowed be thy name) then he pays a little more for both of us, which is how he buys a society where he doesn’t have to watch a bunch of people die because God was having fun that day.
So really let’s put the blame where it’s due here, and acknowledge that mankind attempts to introduce fairness into a system where the Lord (worship him lest you burn) is playing fast and loose with His children He loves so much.
Insurance isn’t the same as savings though. Insurance is just a bet. The insurance company basically says “Give me $5000 this year and I will cover your health care costs if you ever accrue any this year otherwise I keep the money.” The insurance company just bets that most of their clients won’t put in any claims.
Not to mention most people can never save enough money to cover the cost of a massive healthcare bill if they get into an accident or get cancer.
This is the US version.
Another version is that the insurance is a mutual fund where everyone is polling money that can be used at any time to pay medical bills. This is not what is happening in the US of course but in some countries the model is similar to that.
The administrators of the mutual fund still make a bet that their income (mainly the money they charge members/customers) will meet or exceed the claims they pay out, no? They might not have a profit motive, but that doesn’t change the basic economics of needing income to be >= expenses.
That’s not insurance, but - funny, I don’t know an English word for this concept. Ok - looked it up, there are words like “friendly society” and “mutual aid fund”. Literally what you wrote.
In Australia we have pretty good public health care. IDK what “universal healthcare” is exactly but everyone gets treated for free for most things.
We also have private health insurance. The relationship between the public and private systems is complex but the main difference for most people is wait times.
I know someone with a back injury that causes constant pain, they manage it with prescribed opiates. The problem is it’s not life-threatening so they’re not a priority for triage. They’re about 1 year through a 4 year wait. If they had private insurance they could probably have the surgery in a few months.
Weirdly, they could start a private health insurance policy, serve the 1 year exclusion for pre-existing conditions, and get their back fixed - I don’t know them well enough to ask why they don’t do that. Anyway.
There’s also a problem in my state where the hospital system is getting “clogged up” with people who should be in aged care facilities and so on. If you have a car accident and break your leg, if you don’t have private health insurance an ambulance will take you to the nearest public hospital. In some cases there’s a queue of ambulances parked up outside. An ER doctor will still come and check on you, just to make sure you’re not dying. This wouldn’t be a problem if you had private health insurance and were taken to a private hospital.
That said, there’s no private hospital within 400km of where I live. I have private health insurance but I can of course still go to the public ER. I don’t have anything bad to say about them. They’re great really and I’ve never had to wait an unreasonable amount of time.
That said, the cost is no where near what others are saying it costs in the US. We pay $400 AUD a month for our whole family, but that includes a lot of extra non-hospital stuff like dental and glasses. That works out to about 3% or 4% of an average family income.
It’s the same in the UK. There is national healthcare which is what most people go with because it’s free (and most people underestimate how infuriating it is sitting in a waiting room for 6 hours) and then there’s private healthcare which is what you go with if you want expediency.
A lot of the time if you go with private you end up being tended to by the same medical staff anyway, you’re basically just paying to skip the queue.
and most people underestimate how infuriating it is sitting in a waiting room for 6 hours
In America we pay too much for healthcare AND sit in the waiting room for hours
and most people underestimate how infuriating it is sitting in a waiting room for 6 hours
As an American: those are rookie numbers, I’ve been stuck waiting 6-8 on a bad day to get seen, not even counting the hours it takes to get more than vitals and some iv liquid…
Not trying to one up, I wish we had a system like that here.
We have long wait times too. Even with gold standard health insurance. ER can easily take 6-12 hours, and appointments are scheduled usually weeks to even months out
Trump used to support a Canadian-style, single-payer health care plan. However, the closer he got to the presidency, the more he backed away from that. Funny how that works.
holy shit is it really 26000?? that’s more than what i pay in tax every year in europe. (granted i am poor but)
the US already spends more public funds in healthcare per capita than every country with free healthcare.
on top of that, we pay a shit ton extra for insurance, then a shit ton more in copays/deductibles, plus a shit ton more because something isn’t included…
you could lower taxes by thousands and give everyone free healthcare.
the US healthcare is nothing but a massive scam. the kind where the perpetators kill tens of thousands per year and rake in endless money. there’s no justification besides rich people like being rich, even if it means killing thousands of innocents. in any civilized world those executives should be tortured to death.
You guys need a lot more Italian plumbers…
why? they didn’t do anything, Luigi was with me that day
It was like 500-600 a month for two people a decade ago but the insurance plans on the exchange have gone up in price about a 100 monthly, every year. But they also dissappear after getting too high, so there are increasingly fewer plans from new or small providers. This year it’s 1200 monthly. These plans were actually quite good though compared to regular plans people get from their employer, with 0 copay and 0 deductible. For low income people on the exchange it cost them 0-100$ monthly for them, and the subsidies covered the entire plan cost up to around 1000$ a month. So last year you could have excellent health coverage for 50 dollars a month, but no longer.
The big problem of course was that without the universal mandate, the whole obamacare plan didn’t really work long term because the cost kept going up without any of the parts to keep that price down because of the Supreme court.
these plans were actually quite good though compared to regular plans people get from their employer, with 0 copay and 0 deductible
I’m super skeptical of the 0 deductible plans. I’ve only ever seen them offered in situations where the plans can be expected to be not-great, both on the marketplace for both '25 and '26 (I’d never used the insurance marketplace before last year) and when working at a tiny company with less than 10 employees. I’m not sure how they work but given that I assume they end up costing more than plans with a deductible
Tbh this is also shocking to me as an American. I am not sure if this is only for marketplace plans or a specific kind or what
The marketplace just had their subsidies cut. Its so funny its like “here’s less than 1/3 back what we cut to line our pockets, you filthy animals, PS, fuck off and die, signed Donald Pedophile Trump.”
The insult on top of that injury is that the penalties for being uninsured weren’t removed.
Assuming a typical family of four, 2k a month for marketplace insurance is actually pretty cheap. My partner just got his tax documents, and between him and his employer, they spent 10k last year to insure a single adult. I’ve got a ton of health problems, and we’ve talked about adding me to his plan, but that’s an extra $500 a month.
It’s not 2k for coverage… Its 2k to gfys. Orange man backwards ubi
