LOOL

Moved to a country that doesn't suck wrt healthcare.

Regarding the New START treaty: "Just another bad deal that the country made"
Well, add the Prisoners' Dilemma to the list of things that Trump is too stupid to understand

Its still an opt out proposal, but it would be stupid to opt out. This is why I specified that many times. I asked you and others numerous times why anyone WOULD opt out if it was obviously very stupid to do so and you all just kept assuring me that it wouldn't work and that people are stupid when it comes to money. Why is it not ok to let people make stupid monetary decisions re: healthcare when we let them make those decisions in hundreds of other areas of their lives?

CDL,

If you actually care to learn something (lol), we have like a 5000 post thread in Politics where your moronic, uninformed, hopelessly naive views have already been destroyed a hundred times over. Since your actual goal is to garner attention by being willfully stupid and ikesianly contrarian...carry on.

So then how is my proposal worse than the ACA? Dudd seems convinced that it is even though people are opting out of the ACA en masse.

none of this is about going to the doctor. It is about being insured. You can be insured and never use any medical services or medications or be uninsured and use a plethora of them.

Your proposal is ****ing ******ed. Nobody thinks they will get sick beforehand.

Why would anyone pay cash if they were insured? And my proposal isn't about getting out of taxes. Its about paying taxes and then getting some sort of partial rebate if you don't want to be able to use the service. FWIW, this isn't proposal for a tax cut.

Riverman, I have a very simple question then. Assume we have Universal Healthcare where the costs were fully borne by the government and everyone had coverage. There is NO benefit to opting out of this program other than the idea that you exercised your freedom to opt out (your tax dollars are still used for the program and now you have no coverage). Why would it be bad to allow people to opt to not be covered?

Note that the system is not compromised (the covered people would still be covered since all the money is still there and now there is one less person to cover after someone opts out).

I think if someone wants to make a stupid decision to not have healthcare instead of having healthcare then we should let them do it. You guys apparently do not. Since no one thinks they will get sick beforehand those people might as well opt out, right?

edit: and I've opened that thread before. It addresses the opt out issue in terms of premiums afaict. I have only seen arguments that allowing people to opt out will compromise the system and increase costs for the covered. In this case it does the opposite. If someone opts out of being insured then the people who are insured are actually MORE COVERED than they were before that person left. Operating under the premise that the insurance is actually more healthy financially then why is it bad to allow people to opt out?

That is a stumper. An all-time stumper.

I dunno why you went away from your question being "what's the problem with a la carte taxation" tho.

Example: Me, Dudd, Riverman, suzzer, bware, pwnsall, noze, and Meb are the entire population for this healthcare plan. Contributions (and rebates) in terms of tax dollars are as follows:

Me: $15,000 ($2,500)
Dudd: $10,000 ($1,500)
Riverman: $25,000 ($3,500)
suzzer: $6,000 ($750)
bware: $2,500 ($250)
pwnsall: $7,500 ($1,000)
noze: $1,500 ($0)
Meb: $4,000 ($500)

now this system has $71,500 in it to cover healthcare for 8 people.

If all 8 of us drop out then the system still has $61,500 and no one to cover. That's great financial health!

Now, let's assume that riverman, noze, dudd, and meb drop because they think this is dumb. Noze doesn't even get a rebate for dropping, but wants to do so in principal because he hates the plan architect. These four are gonna pay for their healthcare out of pocket. This nets them there rebates and leaves me, suzzer, bware, and pwnsall to be covered with a smaller pool of money. The 4 of us have $66,000 to cover us. Unless the 4 who dropped used less than $5,500 in healthcare then we are left in better shape!

Sure that's possible with only 4 people, but its not likely and when you scale this up to ~325mm people it just won't happen as costs will converge to their true mean with such a large population.

POTY so far

Anecdotally, the ability to "opt-out" of universal healthcare would appear to be a huge selling-point to the legions of knuckle-draggers who want Obamacare out of their Affordable Care Act. I don't know if the economics make sense, but I suspect the politics do. Per Meb's example, it looks as if costs are rising fairly substantially in the current mandate-based system, anyway. Totally a hunch, but I suspect a not insignificant percentage of people refusing the mandate would not opt-out if given the choice rather than being told "get in line or fine."

CDL, we all agree that if you can get people to pay into the system and not use it, the math works out. However, you sold this idea originally as a way to get the Republicans to accept a single payer system, so you should be able to see why your proposal is laughably naive and not what anyone who originally read it thought you were proposing

no, I didn't. I originally said there is nothing inherently wrong with allowing people to opt out of health insurance and not have coverage. here is the quote:

I even mentioned that I wasn't talking specifically, but rather why people think this shouldn't be an option under any system.

lol the ****ing imbecile who constantly cites 'many people say/think' says the media shouldn't be allowed to use anonomys sources

correct

"How many elections do we have to have?"

ummm...hopefully one every 4 years for the job you have

Here's the problem, CDL.

Noze, who has no net worth and dropped out of the health care because he's an idiot, falls out of a tree outside Drew Brees' bathroom window, suffering a broken neck and a severe rectal trauma from his binoculars when he landed awkwardly. The costs for his immediate and long-term care are $24,000.

We still require the hospital to provide treatment, because we don't want people to die on the street as already discussed.

Noze, of course, has no net worth, so he won't pay anything for the care. He's legally obligated of course, but "legally obligated" doesn't pay the doctors and the nurses and the secretaries and the vendors who supply the medicine. If he wants to declare bankruptcy, he can, and now the hospital has no ability to collect.

Presumably the taxpayers aren't going to immediately pay for Noze's health care, because he's opted out. (If the taxpayers paid for the services of people who opted out, everyone would opt out because it's literally free money.)

Which leaves the hospital in the position of either:

1) Merely accepting that 1/3 of their projected revenue doesn't exist for this year, even though they are legally obligated to provide care to Noze. I guess the doctors and the nurses and the secretaries and the vendors who supply medicine and beds and stuff will just have to get paid 1/3 less. No, that's not how it works.

2) The hospital can raise the prices significantly to cover the inherent costs of idiots like Noze. The good news is that if we just artificially raise the price of all care by 50%, that will solve the problem nicely; that way the other $47,500 of legitimate care (assuming we priced everything correctly in the first place) will now cost $71,250 from the single payer system, and we've approximately washed it out. Of course, this has the effect of making the people who have opted in to the system pay more for their health care than people who opted out, which sounds like a pretty strong incentive for poor people to opt out, and is exactly what we're trying to prevent in the first place!

We of course haven't figured in the additional cost to the hospital to maintain the army of lawyers and collection agencies to chase people who are like Noze except they actually have money and just don't feel like paying, and expending a bunch of time and money to figure out which are the people that actually don't have money and which ones have a stash of slightly soiled Drew Brees rookie cards stuffed under their pillow. This too has to be paid for (solution: raise prices to cover this), and it also delays any payment to the hospital regardless, which now has cash flow problems (solution: raise prices to cover this) and a lot of unnecessary accounts receivable (solution: raise prices to cover this).

And the real bitch of it is that now that Noze is bankrupt, and the hospital knows it and knows they won't get paid the next time he comes in, when he rolls his wheelchair at a ridiculous rate of speed down the ramp and takes a header out of the upper deck of the Superdome like OJ in Naked Gun, they still have to treat him again. Because we don't want people to die in the streets, even stupid ones. And, of course, there's nothing we can do to prevent this even if we wanted to, because you don't want paramedics on scene waiting for you to fish out your Discover card before they warm up the defibrillators.


That seems like an awful lot of trouble to tell Noze he can opt out, even though he isn't actually opting out.

Wetzel, seems like you don't know that bankruptcy isn't a get out of jail free card /s

This speech is the insane ramblings of a feaux tyrant

Obviously.

The hospital collecting $20 per month from the garnished wages should be just fine, now they only have to raise prices by 49.9%.

'If I think means I get bad press, if it means people talk bad about me, thats ok, it doesn't bother me'

Hahahaohwow.jpg

'We had a meeting with all the major businesses, we had everybody, caterpillar, campbells soup...I like Campbell's soup...we had everybody!'