While I might not have been happier income-wise when I was on Medicaid vs now, I was much happier with my medicaid insurance than I have ever been with any private insurance. I could see basically any provider and didn’t have to deal with any of the typical insurance bullshit.
Also when you’re beyond the Medicaid threshold but not that much beyond it absolutely sucks. One year I was paying for dramatically worse insurance with a deductible that would have just made it better for me to just not make more money because if I hit that deductible I would be net negative on my income vs the threshold for Medicaid.
Also I think this is such a false premise. You can still have private plans if you want in the UK or elsewhere with a public health system. Nobody is forcing you to use the public system if you don’t want to. To wit, I don’t have children but I still pay for schools with my taxes. You might not want to use the public health system and instead go private, but yes, you should still be paying for a freely accessible healthcare system.
Here’s the rub on that too: The prices we pay here are so much higher than in Europe even if you go private in those countries. Our system is terrible. Point blank.
I would agree that the NHS in the UK has gotten pretty bad. A large part of that is the result of the Tory government actively working against it though for a very long time. The waitlists for a lot of things are quite long and my fiancé who is from the UK and still lives there has to do some things there are crazy to me. On the other hand she still is able to get care freely. She’s paid private for some dental work but that also cost her pennies on the dollar compared to what I’d be paying if I did the same thing here.
If you’re happy with your insurance I am truly thrilled for you because I don’t think of that as being a common experience.
> Most people with private health insurance like it.
Most people don't use it all that much, and in the common case of employer-paid premiums, the actual cost is significantly masked. As your link notes, the more care you need, the less likely you are to enjoy the experience. They dig their heels in more; sometimes egregiously so. https://www.propublica.org/article/unitedhealth-healthcare-i...
Seems like a just-so story given the numbers. Why would heavy users of health services be concentrated in the minority cohort that is dissatisfied with their insurance?
> Why would heavy users of health services be concentrated in the minority cohort that is dissatisfied with their insurance?
"Why would people who drive a lot care the most about gas prices?"
The more you use health insurance, the more chances you have to run into the kafkaesque bits. Someone who sees a GP once a year and thinks their premium is $50/month because that's the bit they have to chip in while their employer covers the rest is largely gonna go "this is fine!"
Right but there's no such selection effect for whether or not people have employer-provided coverage, and the cohort of households that do strongly approve of their current insurance coverage. I don't see how the argument you're making could hold up statistically. There are a lot of chronically ill people with employer-provided coverage; in fact, most non-senior chronically ill pts fall into that bucket.
> Right but there's no such selection effect for whether or not people have employer-provided coverage…
False. Someone with significant medical issues may well need a higher acuity plan than the employer offers. I, for example, was on the exchanges until last year, for this very reason; my employer's coverage would not have made financial sense.
> There are a lot of chronically ill people with employer-provided coverage…
The chronically ill are less likely to be employed.
Based on what? Why even leave this comment if you’re just going to say “would likely be worse off” without giving literally any evidence or even suggestion of why.
Insurance is a pool. The bigger your pool the more you spread the risk/load. It’s brain dead simple. Medical care is a human right, beyond that.
Nothing about our system makes any sense and it is built to pad so many pockets in entirely opaque ways between you and the care you actually receive. Cut out several layers of middlemen and the costs go down. God forbid you have an accident and you end up at the wrong hospital when the one down the road is in-network but the one they took you to is out-of-network and you wake up owing thousands of dollars.
I had pretty good marketplace insurance this year but the plan I’m on now isn’t even offered anymore and if I got the next closest offered plan I’d be paying 6X as much for the premiums with higher copays on top. I’ll be switching to my union offered plan instead which is much better than the new marketplace plan but still worse than the marketplace insurance I had before.
> God forbid you have an accident and you end up at the wrong hospital when the one down the road is in-network but the one they took you to is out-of-network and you wake up owing thousands of dollars.
If you examine the statement of benefits for your plan, you will find that it says something similar to this:
> Emergency Services are covered at the in-network cost-sharing level as required by applicable state or federal law if services are received from a non participating (out-of-network) provider.
> The member is responsible for applicable in-network cost-sharing amounts (any deductible, copay or coinsurance). The member is not responsible for any charges that may be made in excess of the allowable amount.
You’re right. The No Surprises Act did make this a lot better. However it still doesn’t cover ground transport (and specific state laws do in some cases.)
Additionally for post-stabilization care the hospital is going to shove a lot of papers in your face and they’re probably not going to tell you that one of them is the one that says you agree to pay to whatever those services and waive your protection against balance billing. Yes they’re supposed to present it on its own and with your full consent and yes you can dispute that but people sign the forms and then still get screwed.
I think it's telling that people are shocked at the assertion I just made, which is not complicated or outlandish or hard to understand and is in fact backed up by referendum and attempted implementation results for state-level programs. I think two big things are happening that fog people's understanding of this issue:
First, there's a widespread belief that M4A is popular, based on public opinion polling. The problem is that you can make almost anything popular in public opinion polling, and a lot of public opinion polling is deliberately run by interest groups to generate narratives about popularity. It's true: the "M4A" that poll respondents support would be enormously popular: it's proposed as abstraction with no clear tradeoffs. When you confront voters with the prospect of increased taxes and the loss of their current insurance policies, the wheels come off the wagon.
The second big factor is that the demographics of people with employer-provided coverage --- the majority of all non-Medicare covered people in the US --- are not what you'd expect. As soon as you stipulate employer coverage, the cohort you're describing excludes basically all fixed-income and Medicaid-eligible households. The median household income of a family with employer-provided health insurance is closer to $120k than it is to $50k.
For those households, M4A is not a very compelling deal:
* There is a very clear trend in the data for them to already be satisfied with their existing health care.
* The visible component of their insurance spending (their out-of-pocket, excluding employer side payments) is usually quite small compared to total spending.
* M4A would mechanically eliminate the availability of existing plans (unless you came up with a truly weird and distortionate system of tax incentives to keep Anthem and United and Aetna policies going).
Best case: costs that are hidden from those households today become visible, and you hope people are chill about that (in sort of the same way we hoped that people would be chill about inflation given wage increases outpacing it --- see how that went). Worst case, a lot of these households would lose their existing, favored insurance plans and pay more.
Useful here to note that broad taxes on the middle and especially upper-middle class are how Europe funds generous social service packages; you can't get there by taxing the bejeezus out of billionaires. You should do that anyways, just because it's a good idea, but there aren't enough of them to pay the absolutely gobsmacking cost of a single-payer health system in one of the wealthiest large countries in the world.
I'll cop to this: what I wrote last night, about "currently insured" people, was way too vague. I should have said "households with employer-provided health coverage" (again: that's most non-Medicare households). I plead strep throat; you're going to have to give me a break on clarity today.
Sorry but I reject this thinking. You’re essentially saying that Medicare for all is bad because it’ll seem to cost more because the way the money works isn’t obscured so people will be mad and that it has to be worse than their existing policies.
I’m still not seeing how or why it has to be worse. This just seems like an assumption you’re making. Also sure the exact existing policy you have won’t be available by definition because the system has entirely changed but once again if you want private insurance you will still be able to get it, as is the case in other countries with socialized medicine.
Also really don’t see why you would say that the polls that say people want socialized medicine are rigged and not-representative but the polls that you’re saying show that most people with private insurance are happy with it are accurate. Not really sure how that stands to reason.
I really feel like the argument you’re making here boils down to M4A is bad because it has to be worse and people who have private insurance now are happy with their plans and could only have them replaced with something that would be worse. Or even more simply: Change is scary so I guess we’re stuck with the current system and actually people like it so don’t rock the boat.
Also the median income for someone with employer provided healthcare is 120K? I’m going to need some data on that. Also you’re then cutting out everyone with marketplace insurance which is 24 million people.
More people are poised to lose Medicaid and my marketplace insurance plan, if I chose to accept it for next year was going to cost me 6X for the monthly premiums and require co-pays I don’t have before as well as much larger copays for ones I did.
I’m going to be completely honest. I don’t care if people making 120K/year are upset if their visible cost for healthcare is more obvious or not. From 2024 census data 41.2% of households made above 100K annually. That number becomes roughly 33% when you step it up to $150K/year and drops to something like 12% when you get to $200K/year. By the time you get to $400K/year you’re at like 3%.
Also households as a unit isn’t necessarily representative of the distribution of people within them.
I reject the idea that government system are inherently bad and so we can’t have them. I reject the premise that the wealthy will be forced to have worse healthcare to subsidize the majority of Americans. I absolutely reject any notion that our private healthcare as it exists is efficient, affordable and the superior system.
I didn't say Medicare For All was bad. I said a large cohort of existing insured people would be worse off under it. Those are different claims. Whether or not I think it's good has nothing to do with whether or not what I said was correct.
What I think is funny about this is, if I had left a one-line comment saying "this CEO's story about his health insurance costs tells me we all need M4A", nobody would have blinked. Instead, I made a somewhat skeptical observation about it, and got messages demanding I "show my work", or like this one, about how you "reject my thinking".
If people understand and strongly support the policy, they should probably make a point of not being totally bumfuzzled by arguments about it!
Well you can’t prove a negative so I’m not sure how useful a theoretical one line comment about a CEO saying his insurances means we need M4A would be received.
Regardless if you’re not willing to support your argument that’s fine, but at the same time if you’re going to put something out there and and then be upset if other people being skeptical of your skepticism then I don’t know what to tell you.
I still don’t really see how anything you’ve offered necessarily means people who currently have employer provided private insurance plans will be worse off. I especially don’t see it because people with incomes like you proposed the median income for households with employer provided insurance plans often have employer provided private insurance plans in countries that also have a public health system.
I guess maybe here is the meat of it and what matters. How are you defining worse off? Are you defining it based on quality of care/outcomes or in a financial sense? Either way seems pretty speculative to me but I’d be interested to know which (or both) of those you think makes them worse off.
What argument did I not support? The one you assumed I was making, but did not actually make? You still haven't responded to the actual argument I did make.
I agree by the way that a one line comment of “show your work” is not useful or constructive, much like your original one line comment. (I don’t mean that as a slam against you either, I appreciate that you actually followed up with additional information)
I disagree that I’m not responding to your actual argument and am specifically asking you to clarify the terms of what “worse off” means so that I can address it with more specificity or at least understand what you’re saying.
I still think citing an opinion poll to argue that people are happy with their employer insurance while also making an argument about how opinion polling is deeply flawed is a very strange way to back up your own argument.
I have yet to actually hear anything that supports the idea that people with employer provided insurance will be worse off because of M4A other than you saying they the way the costs would be less obscured means people would be more upset. This wasn’t even an argument about the real cost of M4A vs Prost insurance, it was just a statement saying that the money looks different.
Sorry, I can't follow any of this. It sounds like you want to have an argument about whether M4A is better than our current system. I'm not a good debate partner for that.
Good grief. Developers who use Unity/Unreal/Game Maker/ whatever don’t announce their game as being a revolutionary new tech.
The problem isn’t that they made yet another chromium based browser with their garbage on top. The problem is that they’re positioning it as this exciting and radical new thing when it’s just chromium with their garbage on top.
I work for a small ISP servicing both fiber customers and a diminishing (Thanks, starlink) number of fixed wireless customers.
We use all Mikrotik hardware for routing. RouterOS is so flexible and capable. But it is absolutely not user friendly.
For large scale commercial deployments we use Ubiquiti equipment. There is always a Mikrotik router but the APs are all Ubiquiti. It’s just easier and cleaner for us to manage deployments that way.
I see no reason why someone just casually playing with their home network would use Mikrotik though.
We use Cambium for Point-to-Multipoint mostly because the price and selection is better than Ubiquiti but we use the wireless backhaul gear from Ubiquiti in a few spots.
To be perfectly honest if Ubiquiti had the right kind of hardware and management capabilities for us to serve as the root of any deployment I would probably use it everywhere.
Not only are they not really hurt that much by the loss of the tax credit, they’ve already pulled back from their EV ambitions in many ways. That’ll be even easier for them now if they don’t have to spend money on offsets as well.
It is a bad time to be an EV-only manufacturer with mass-market ambitions right now.
Consumers on average are more interested in buying hybrids from the big boys instead of pure EVs and the promised mass market cheap EV game changer is now even more removed from reality with the loss of the tax credits.
To be fair 99 Bananas still tastes like ass with a hint of incredible artificial banana.
Also the cultural aspect is just different. It is generally harder for kids to get alcohol in my experience and also you (usually) don’t carry a bottle of 99 bananas and swig it every few minutes out in public.
Perhaps most importantly is that alcohol doesn’t contain nicotine. People get addicted to alcohol but not in the same way people get addicted to nicotine.
These aren't unique to Tesla, though a lot of manufacturers want you to pay to have a lot of that stuff in their app, which is fucked.
I also want less touch controls and less entirely featureless controls. My car is a 2012 Mini Countryman (no screens other than dot matrix displays) and I was on a roof at a work site and threw my keys down to another guy to move it, He described it as being like `in a spaceship`. Which really tickled me because he had a 2024 mustang with big touch screens in it. I guess mine was like a spaceship to him because of all the physical controls and toggle switches.
My parents have a 2021 Hyundai Santa Cruz (First model year!) and the design is baffling to me. The AC controls are on a capacitive touch display below the main one so you have no idea what you're doing unless you're looking at it. There are also multiple controls with almost no tactile feel at the base of the drive select lever and seat climate controls mounted to the front of the center divider that just a few raised bumps on would go a long way to helping quickly identify them while pawing around there to turn the seat heat/cool. The infotainment does OTA but the maps updates require using a USB drive. You can do it at home though it is an incredibly clunky and antiquated process.
To be perfectly honest the only things about the Santa Cruz that I wish my car had as far as the electronics go is blind spot/camera feeds and modern media support (carplay). Other than that I strongly prefer my incredibly aged dash. My front and center is just a tachometer with a small dot matrix display that shows the current speed digitally with one more below that for a couple other things (I leave it on real-time fuel consumption.) That is it. I'd rather use my phone for maps (Standalone or via carplay) over anything built in to any vehicle I've ever driven.
It is ironic that a lot of the gun control laws conservatives rail about in California are a direct result of Reagan’s time as governor with the intent largely to suppress and allow enforcement against black people having guns.
Obamacare is basically a copy of the healthcare system Romney set up as governor of Massachusetts. Republicans running in more liberal states always have to posture a bit to the left in order to have any chance of getting elected, but once they're running on the national stage they can fully move to the right.
Also when you’re beyond the Medicaid threshold but not that much beyond it absolutely sucks. One year I was paying for dramatically worse insurance with a deductible that would have just made it better for me to just not make more money because if I hit that deductible I would be net negative on my income vs the threshold for Medicaid.
Also I think this is such a false premise. You can still have private plans if you want in the UK or elsewhere with a public health system. Nobody is forcing you to use the public system if you don’t want to. To wit, I don’t have children but I still pay for schools with my taxes. You might not want to use the public health system and instead go private, but yes, you should still be paying for a freely accessible healthcare system.
Here’s the rub on that too: The prices we pay here are so much higher than in Europe even if you go private in those countries. Our system is terrible. Point blank.
I would agree that the NHS in the UK has gotten pretty bad. A large part of that is the result of the Tory government actively working against it though for a very long time. The waitlists for a lot of things are quite long and my fiancé who is from the UK and still lives there has to do some things there are crazy to me. On the other hand she still is able to get care freely. She’s paid private for some dental work but that also cost her pennies on the dollar compared to what I’d be paying if I did the same thing here.
If you’re happy with your insurance I am truly thrilled for you because I don’t think of that as being a common experience.