Once Again, Health Care Proves to Be a Bitter Political Pill for GOP | Hacker News Reader

Once Again, Health Care Proves to Be a Bitter Political Pill for GOP

nytimes.com

6 pointsduxup5 comments

Full article gift link:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/18/us/politics/health-care-g...

Many believe that "the federal health care system has become unwieldy and unaffordable since the passage of Obamacare (ACA)"

Well,it's unaffordable if the wealthy don't pay their fair share of taxes and what we call "health care" is merely subsidizes private medical corporations.

> “The truth is, Republicans have always said they have a plan, but they never had a plan,” Representative Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, the senior Democrat on the Rules Committee, said on Wednesday.

Well, they do, and it's called complete privatization of medical care, but won't admit it, due to political consequences. The overhead of the U.S. medical industry is staggering, the highest in the world. [2]

As the V.A. emailed today: [0]

> WASHINGTON —The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs today released a request for proposals (RFP) for new community care contracts that will improve health care choice and quality for Veterans over the next decade.

> View the RFP here. [1]

> VA’s community care program enables Veterans to access health care from non-VA medical providers at the department’s expense. Community care has been an integral part of caring for Veterans since the World War II era. In 2018, President Trump enshrined this right for Veterans by signing the bipartisan MISSION Act. Today, about 40% of all VA care is provided through community care.

I call "community care" a euphemism for privatization. They are privatizing the entire V.A. one step at a time. Subsidizing private providers.

[0] https://news.va.gov/press-room/va-to-improve-health-care-cho...

[1] https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/7b2734002e4048bfa2ac4...

[2] https://cepr.net/publications/paying-more-for-less-the-us-he...

We will never fix health care in the US. It will eventually bankrupt the nation.

US healthcare is expensive because prices aren’t real and complexity is profitable. Hospitals and pharma have monopoly power, insurers add massive administrative drag, and nobody sets hard price limits. ~25–30% is spent on billing and paperwork alone. Hospitals consolidate into regional monopolies. Drug companies charge whatever they want. Insurance act as a middleman for routine care instead of risk protection. Outcomes don’t justify the cost. The system is optimized to extract revenue, not deliver care efficiently.

Fixing it doesn’t require utopia: cap prices for common services and drugs, enforce antitrust to break hospital monopolies, standardize billing nationally, and let Medicare (and others) negotiate drug prices. Shift insurance back to catastrophic coverage while covering primary care publicly, and cut hospital admin while paying clinicians more. These are boring, proven levers that haven’t happened because every inefficiency has a powerful lobby defending it.

I expect in 10 years most health insurance premiums will just be used to travel to either Canada or Mexico to get treatment. The United States will no longer have a functioning healthcare system (not that it’s anywhere near functioning today)

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