In 2010, I had good union health insurance. Obamacare was the law of the land | Hacker News Reader

In 2010, I had good union health insurance. Obamacare was the law of the land

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For the record:

Her final tweet is a political endorsement. That is not why I posted this.

I wasn't going to say anything because I didn't really expect this to get traction. But now it has comments.

  I didn't really expect this to get traction

Most of your submits anymore are just tweets, and most of those have been both inflammatory and unvetted. Some were even deleted the same day.

I think it's time that Twitter and Reddit be disallowed as submit sources. If a submitter can't find one actual source article or even a blog entry (or bother to write one themselves!) with supporting references or corresponding content, it doesn't belong here.

There are tweets that do well here. I've had tweets I posted hit the front page.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=doreenmichele+twitter.com

This is a large enough forum that it's reasonable to assume by default that most posts will not get traction.

I go through periods where I mostly post from Twitter, but that doesn't constitute the majority of my submissions. I don't post stuff to be inflammatory. I post stuff I think is interesting for some reason. Just because I think it's interesting doesn't guarantee it will be interesting to anyone here.

I'm perfectly happy to write and post original content, but I also get crabbed at for submitting blog entries I wrote myself. At least some of that appears to be a case of "sexism is alive and well."

"Obamacare was the law of the land."

In fact, Obamacare didn't begin to take effect until 2014, 4 years later.

These stories of how predatory the American health care and health insurance system is, never fail to disgust me.

Something fishy about this story, but let's presume it is 100% true. Medicare for all would be much bigger than Obamacare; in fact, the physical infrastructure and the workforce infrastructure is not in place to service the entire population. Most people on Medicare today have to wait months for doctors and surgeries. VA hospitals have trouble servicing veterans in a timely and professional manner.

To have Medicare for all would require a Doctor and Nurses Corps, thousands of hospitals would have to be erected and staffed. It's not going to happen, especially with a hostile Senate and no mandate from the public at large. A public option remains overall more popular than Medicare for All, according to a Kaiser Hospital poll.

Why would the need to be a doctor or nurse Corps? Providers would remain private, only the insurance would be paid by Medicare.

Further the government could subcontract with existing insurance companies for administrative services reducing job losses and ensuring competitive market dynamics for part of the health system.

Why couldn’t all the existing doctors, nurses, and hospitals be used? There won’t suddenly be double the population.

Population growth would not surge, but demand for healthcare would. If the Veterans Administration hospitals and local community hospitals cannot adequately service the health needs of their respective communities quickly, that indicates to me more infrastructure and medical personnel have to be created. Doing this would be is a good thing. This infrastructure should be rolled out with deliberate thought rather than by the stroke of a pen.

Some people want to keep their employer insurance due to quality and service. They don't want to see their employer cancel it to save money once Medicare for all is in play. When healthcare in Great Britain or Sweeden is mention as a solution, it looks and sounds good on paper, but the US has over 327-million people versus Great Britain's 67-million and Sweden's 11-million population.

From Wikipedia" "...The Swedish health care system is mainly government-funded, universal for all citizens and decentralized, although private health care also exists. A shortage of medical personnel is a major problem. The health care system in Sweden is financed primarily through taxes levied by county councils and municipalities." I can't imagine what the shortages of doctors and nurses in the US would be. YMMV.

Maybe it would help if the US took a look at how other countries handle this. For the money that the US pays (per capita) for Medicare, the UK manage to cover everybody, yet the US only covers elderly people. Americans are already paying for socialised health care, they're just not receiving it, and are expected to pay extra, and a lot extra, to get their own coverage.

There's an immense amount of inefficiency that can be cut from the system. This won't be easy of course, but it's absolutely possible. Every single other wealthy country manages it. Every time Americans claim it cannot be done in their country, I'm surprised at that "cannot do spirit". The US used to have a very different attitude about such challenges in the past. What happened?

> To have Medicare for all would require a Doctor and Nurses Corps, thousands of hospitals would have to be erected and staffed.

No, neither of those would be required. Existing hospitals, clinics, medical groups, and individual providers would just continue to operate, but reduce admin costs and staff because they'd only have to deal with far fewer payers (not just one, because the actual concrete Medicare for All plans aren't quite single payer and generally continue to keep at least Medicaid as a separate program.)

> It's not going to happen, especially with a hostile Senate

Who says there is going to be a hostile Senate after the 2020 election? Or, if there still is, after the 2022 midterm?

> A public option remains overall more popular than Medicare for All, according to a Kaiser Hospital poll.

You are almost certainly referring to the Kaiser Family Foundation, which is unconnected (except in history long past) with Kaiser Permanente, the insurer/provider/hospital organization. And note that both of those options have majority support (because support overlaps).

https://www.kff.org/health-reform/poll-finding/kff-health-tr...

It sounds great until the govt decides you aren't viable, or you're to old or young to be worth financials strain put upon the system.

Perhaps you're of the wrong political, religious or cultural persuasion and a bureaucrat determines that you aren't selected for treatment.

Ultimately, the people get what they deserve i suppose.

Of course, we could always have nurses and PAs do more surgeries. Personally, i like the idea of a Bernie bro telling someone that it isn't worth trying to save their kid, it just might help them let go.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/02/24/nurses-carry-sur...

...So we let private for profit companies decide instead. And also have large competing bureaucracies that have incomplete networks of providers cobble together care.

There will always be rationing. The system now masks the rationing by creating incomplete networks of providers. People then pretend that we have unlimited choice with no rationing.

Is there proof that something like this actually happens in countries with universal healthcare?

Is there proof it is actually worse than the current US system, where people with preexisting conditions or other risk factors are routinely denied coverage?

Otherwise, this is just plain FUD.

> "It sounds great until the govt decides you aren't viable, or you're to old or young to be worth financials strain put upon the system."

I think you mean "insurance company", not "govt", there. Private insurers in the US have a history of doing stuff like this. Government-run health insurance systems tend to cover everybody with a lot less red tape than this.

This comments says so much about you, and how you would love to withhold healthcare from ''those people''. Your comment says nothing about having universal healthcare.

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