Current Events > Biden's health care plan is pretty good imho

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/15/politics/joe-biden-health-care-plan-obamacare-public-option/index.html

The public option would cover women's contraception and abortion, Biden officials said. Obamacare currently covers contraception at no cost. Abortion services are currently excluded from the 10 essential health benefits that insurers must cover. Insurers may offer coverage of abortions as long as they comply with the requirement to segregate federal funds.

Biden would also enroll nearly 5 million Americans who would have been eligible for Medicaid under Obamacare's expansion of the program -- but live in states that rejected that expansion -- in the public option, for free.

And he would take a series of steps designed to lower the cost of purchasing insurance on Obamacare's exchanges by providing federal subsidies for everyone, regardless of their income.
Currently, only those who earn less than 400% of the federal poverty level -- or about $100,000 annually for a family of four -- qualify for help paying their premiums. Biden would lift that cap.

Also, those enrolled in an Obamacare plan would have to pay no more than 8.5% of their income -- instead of the current 9.86% -- in premiums. A family of four earning $110,000 annually would save about $750 a month in premiums, the campaign said.

And he would base those subsidies on the cost of "gold plans," which have higher premiums but lower deductibles, rather than less generous "silver plans." That means people could spend less money out of pocket -- or could use the larger subsidies to buy less expensive silver or bronze plans. This move would help address a major criticism of Obamacare -- that its deductibles are too high. The average deductible for an enrollee under Obamacare in a "gold plan" is just under $1,600 in 2019, while for a "silver plan," it's just over $4,000, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
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if it doesn't ban private insurance im not interested
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IMO get universal healthcare first except for abortions, then start to talk about including abortions
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How about just leaving it up to the states their hospitals and insurance companies? it's gonna head this way anyway despite what citizens want
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AlephZero posted...

if it doesn't ban private insurance im not interested

Doesnt countries like Sweden and Canada also have supplemental private insurance?

EndOfDiscOne posted...

IMO get universal healthcare first except for abortions, then start to talk about including abortions

better than getting public coverage for the neediest among us that includes abortion coverage and expanding it outward from there?
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Spooking posted...

Taxpayers pay for abortions? Nope.

Churches can start paying taxes if they want their pro life message to start spreading into my life.

cmiller4642 posted...

Spooking posted...

Taxpayers pay for abortions? Nope.

Churches can start paying taxes if they want their pro life message to start spreading into my life.

This
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Doesnt amount to anything near the socialist healthcare system this country desperately needs. We need an actual progressive in the White House, not another DINO.
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CruelBuffalo posted...

AlephZero posted...

if it doesn't ban private insurance im not interested

Doesnt countries like Sweden and Canada also have supplemental private insurance?

well Sweden doesn't have single payer, iirc it has something more like the NHS in the UK. that is, the government doesn't just pay for it, they provide it. kind of a different argument imo

but with Canada the main difference is that the proposed single payer under M4A would be so much more generous than Canada's so as to effectively outlaw private coverage. it would be de facto because it would only technically outlaw plans that offer benefits that are covered by the public plan. but the public plan covers basically everything worth mentioning
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bump
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I'm just glad we're at a point where 5 paragraphs of information is enough to make a judgement call on something as simple as health care.

Joking aside, I'd imagine if I read the entire plan it'd be a nice moderate healthcare plan which is likely what we need (the abortion angle probably leans it more left leaning)

But moderation isn't what we're going to get in 2020 I think.

Balrog0 posted...

EndOfDiscOne posted...

IMO get universal healthcare first except for abortions, then start to talk about including abortions

better than getting public coverage for the neediest among us that includes abortion coverage and expanding it outward from there?

The neediest people would be covered by Medicare for all. Thats the solution. Obamacare still means you have to pay, therefore there will be people who cant afford it, therefore it doesnt take care of the needy.
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The plan seems centered on improving the exchanges, but only a small fraction of people (about 11 million) get their insurance through the exchanges currently. Maybe that number goes up under such a plan, but does this do anything for the people whose employer-sponsored coverage is going up in price?
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Should really move to a Single Payer system.
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manmouse posted...

The neediest people would be covered by Medicare for all.

I never said anything to the contrary.

manmouse posted...

Obamacare still means you have to pay, therefore there will be people who cant afford it, therefore it doesnt take care of the needy.

I know this isn't in vogue, but I don't personally think universal programs are the way forward on health care. In terms of the actual policy, I tend to believe that people who have more means should indeed pay more.

But I'm more asking from a political angle which seems more likely. I guess neither, lol

Antifar posted...

The plan seems centered on improving the exchanges, but only a small fraction of people (about 11 million) get their insurance through the exchanges currently. Maybe that number goes up under such a plan, but does this do anything for the people whose employer-sponsored coverage is going up in price?

very little; they have a couple of plans to keep prescription drug prices down that would impact people with ESI, and the affordability change would either put a slightly lower cap on the expenses of ESI or cause more ESI to fail the affordability test, which would mean that employee could qualify for premium tax credits on the individual marketplaces
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Biden is really lighting the world on fire with Obamacare....1.2? 2.0 would be too ambitious.

RoadsterUFO posted...

cmiller4642 posted...

Spooking posted...

Taxpayers pay for abortions? Nope.

Churches can start paying taxes if they want their pro life message to start spreading into my life.

In what way is this a damn argument? I really dont care if some woman wants to be a deadbeat and fail to take responsibility for the consequences of having consensual sex with a man who is an even bigger loser than she is, keep me the hell out of it. Im not banging the chick, I dont even know her personally, thus I have never ever met her. In what way is someone like me obligated to be forced to fund her services?

In the same way that taxpayers are obligated to support healthcare in general under such a system.

ElatedVenusaur posted...

Biden is really lighting the world on fire with Obamacare....1.2? 2.0 would be too ambitious.

it's more like Obamacare Classic lol
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RoadsterUFO posted...

Dragonblade01 posted...

RoadsterUFO posted...

cmiller4642 posted...

Spooking posted...

Taxpayers pay for abortions? Nope.

Churches can start paying taxes if they want their pro life message to start spreading into my life.

In what way is this a damn argument? I really dont care if some woman wants to be a deadbeat and fail to take responsibility for the consequences of having consensual sex with a man who is an even bigger loser than she is, keep me the hell out of it. Im not banging the chick, I dont even know her personally, thus I have never ever met her. In what way is someone like me obligated to be forced to fund her services?

In the same way that taxpayers are obligated to support healthcare in general under such a system.

Youre not making any argument. My dick is right here, the womans vagina that you want to forcefully extort my paycheck to subsidize that I have never touched or met is over there in another part of the country. This isnt a hard thing to grasp

Isn't your argument against any type of universal healthcare? Which is fine. Whatever. It just doesn't seem specific to abortion
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RoadsterUFO posted...

Youre not making any argument. My dick is right here, the womans vagina that you want to forcefully extort my paycheck to subsidize that I have never touched or met is over there in another part of the country. This isnt a hard thing to grasp

So you're against publicly sponsored abortion because you didn't get to bang, got it
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RoadsterUFO posted...

emblem boy posted...

RoadsterUFO posted...

Dragonblade01 posted...

RoadsterUFO posted...

cmiller4642 posted...

Spooking posted...

Taxpayers pay for abortions? Nope.

Churches can start paying taxes if they want their pro life message to start spreading into my life.

In what way is this a damn argument? I really dont care if some woman wants to be a deadbeat and fail to take responsibility for the consequences of having consensual sex with a man who is an even bigger loser than she is, keep me the hell out of it. Im not banging the chick, I dont even know her personally, thus I have never ever met her. In what way is someone like me obligated to be forced to fund her services?

In the same way that taxpayers are obligated to support healthcare in general under such a system.

Youre not making any argument. My dick is right here, the womans vagina that you want to forcefully extort my paycheck to subsidize that I have never touched or met is over there in another part of the country. This isnt a hard thing to grasp

Isn't your argument against any type of universal healthcare? Which is fine. Whatever. It just doesn't seem specific to abortion

My position is I keep what I earn from selling my time to my employer and you keep what you earn from selling your time to your employer. Disagree? Tell me, what percentage of what I earned from my work shifts that you didnt spend a single second of my time working are you entitled to and why. What is your fair share of what I earned that you did not?

Some would say that the fact that you earned that money was dependent on using an infrastructure built by taxpayers, so for everyone to pay nothing towards the very same world would just result in unprecedented wealth hoarding and an outright collapse of said system.
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RoadsterUFO posted...

My position is I keep what I earn from selling my time to my employer and you keep what you earn from selling your time to your employer. Disagree? Tell me, what percentage of what I earned from my work shifts that you didnt spend a single second of my time working are you entitled to and why. What is your fair share of what I earned that you did not?

... I mean, that has nothing to do with what I asked.
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emblem boy posted...

RoadsterUFO posted...

My position is I keep what I earn from selling my time to my employer and you keep what you earn from selling your time to your employer. Disagree? Tell me, what percentage of what I earned from my work shifts that you didnt spend a single second of my time working are you entitled to and why. What is your fair share of what I earned that you did not?

... I mean, that has nothing to do with what I asked.

I'm pretty sure it's his way of saying that you're correct and that the argument is against tax payer funded anything
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cmiller4642 posted...

Spooking posted...

Taxpayers pay for abortions? Nope.

Churches can start paying taxes if they want their pro life message to start spreading into my life.

Abortions or not, churches should never have been exempt from taxes in the first place. Fuck em
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iPhone_7 posted...

Doesnt amount to anything near the socialist healthcare system this country desperately needs. We need an actual progressive in the White House, not another DINO.

lel, shhh
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https://twitter.com/libbycwatson/status/1150781691423838209
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Antifar posted...

https://twitter.com/libbycwatson/status/1150781691423838209

so it can't be that bad right?
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Balrog0 posted...

Antifar posted...

https://twitter.com/libbycwatson/status/1150781691423838209

so it can't be that bad right?

It's just funny, to me, to see this plan that is explicitly put forth as an alternative to a government-run system nevertheless be attacked as a stepping stone to such a system. The efforts to appease the industry have once again been ineffective.
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Stop fucking suggesting that taxpayers fund abortion

I know you don't think it's immoral but a lot of people in the country does, stop forcing people to pay for things they find fucking immoral. And stop forcing people to fund your bad decisions.
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On_The_Edge posted...

I know you don't think it's immoral but a lot of people in the country does, stop forcing people to pay for things they find fucking immoral.

You are advocating an end to taxation, period. There are people who find just about every government activity immoral.
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At some point you just have to realize Biden is actively trying to lose the election. There's no other explanation for him being this bad.
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Antifar posted...

https://twitter.com/libbycwatson/status/1150781691423838209

The healthcare industry doesnt like Bidens plan

Oil & coal industry doesnt like environmental bill

Military weapons industry doesnt like peace negotiations
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I still don't see a mandate for hospitals to list prices
I still don't see a mandate to support cross-state lines insurance purchases
I still don't see an attempt at standardizing medicine prices
I still don't see better support for doctors to deal with malpractice lawsuits
I still don't see an attempt at addressing the patent problem that is the source of medicine price problems.

This plan doesn't really fix anything. It just throws a bunch of money at the problem to temporarily lower costs so people feel all warm and fuzzy until it's someone else's problem.
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His plan is too late and a dollar short (that would be good in 2008-2010), UHC is the only answer in 2019.
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s0nicfan posted...

I still don't see a mandate for hospitals to list prices
I still don't see a mandate to support cross-state lines insurance purchases
I still don't see an attempt at standardizing medicine prices
I still don't see better support for doctors to deal with malpractice lawsuits
I still don't see an attempt at addressing the patent problem that is the source of medicine price problems.

that's because most of these things are irrelevant to addressing the problem, tbh

though it does tackle prescription patents at least

https://joebiden.com/healthcare/

Limiting launch prices for drugs that face no competition and are being abusively priced by manufacturers. Through his work on the Cancer Moonshot, Biden understands that the future of pharmacological interventions is not traditional chemical drugs but specialized biotech drugs that will have little to no competition to keep prices in check. Without competition, we need a new approach for keeping the prices of these drugs down. For these cases where new specialty drugs without competition are being launched, under the Biden Plan the Secretary of Health and Human Services will establish an independent review board to assess their value. The board will recommend a reasonable price, based on the average price in other countries (a process called external reference pricing) or, if the drug is entering the U.S. market first, based on an evaluation by the independent board members. This reasonable price will be the rate Medicare and the public option will pay. In addition, the Biden Plan will allow private plans participating in the individual marketplace to access a similar rate.

Limiting price increases for all brand, biotech, and abusively priced generic drugs to inflation. As a condition of participation in the Medicare program and public option, all brand, biotech, and abusively priced generic drugs will be prohibited from increasing their prices more than the general inflation rate. The Biden Plan will also impose a tax penalty on drug manufacturers that increase the costs of their brand, biotech, or abusively priced generic over the general inflation rate.

Allowing consumers to buy prescription drugs from other countries. To create more competition for U.S. drug corporations, the Biden Plan will allow consumers to import prescription drugs from other countries, as long as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has certified that those drugs are safe.

Improving the supply of quality generics. Generics help reduce health care spending, but brand drug corporations have succeeded in preserving a number of strategies to help them delay the entrance of a generic into the market even after the patent has expired. The Biden Plan supports numerous proposals to accelerate the development of safe generics, such as Senator Patrick Leahys proposal to make sure generic manufacturers have access to a sample.
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Balrog0 posted...

that's because most of these things are irrelevant to addressing the problem, tbh

Not if you're also interested in controlling cost as well as coverage.
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already a better plan than 3 years with trump lel
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Antifar posted...

On_The_Edge posted...

I know you don't think it's immoral but a lot of people in the country does, stop forcing people to pay for things they find fucking immoral.

You are advocating an end to taxation, period. There are people who find just about every government activity immoral.

Yup. Taxation is immoral.

But even within the immorality of taxation, don't act like you don't know that people think that abortion is literally murder, that it's the taking of an innocent human soul. To force people to violate their conscience in that grave a manner is sadistic.
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s0nicfan posted...

Not if you're also interested in controlling cost as well as coverage.

No, most of those are utterly irrelevant either way. Interstate insurance sales are already legal, I'm pretty sure because of the ACA. And there are several states that allow people to purchase across state lines already. But no one takes advantage of it because there are structural issues with forming provider networks rather than legal ones. I only skimmed this, but it seems like a good brief: https://nashp.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Insurance-Across-State-Lines.pdf

Malpractice suits are a very small part of the cost of health care, and it depends on where you get your coverage. Certain kinds of tort reform reduce premiums by 1-2%, but only for PPOs rather than HMOs. More people are covered in PPOs, true, but that's pretty small potatoes regardless. https://www.nber.org/papers/w15371.pdf

I'm not against listing prices for hospitals, but I think it misunderstands the problem with health care, at least if you mean consumer-facing prices. Hospitals, like insurers, have structural advantages and disadvantages that drive a lot of the costs. Hospitals with monopolies can negotiate higher reimbursement rates from insurance providers. Price shopping matters, but only once you get people covered, otherwise they don't have the leverage to negotiate lower prices. That's what insurance is for, almost literally.

An attempt to standardize medicine prices is called single-payer. What other mechanism do you see to address that?
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Balrog0 posted...

s0nicfan posted...

Not if you're also interested in controlling cost as well as coverage.

No, most of those are utterly irrelevant either way. Interstate insurance sales are already legal, I'm pretty sure because of the ACA. And there are several states that allow people to purchase across state lines already. But no one takes advantage of it because there are structural issues with forming provider networks rather than legal ones. I only skimmed this, but it seems like a good brief: https://nashp.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Insurance-Across-State-Lines.pdf

Malpractice suits are a very small part of the cost of health care, and it depends on where you get your coverage. Certain kinds of tort reform reduce premiums by 1-2%, but only for PPOs rather than HMOs. More people are covered in PPOs, true, but that's pretty small potatoes regardless. https://www.nber.org/papers/w15371.pdf

I'm not against listing prices for hospitals, but I think it misunderstands the problem with health care, at least if you mean consumer-facing prices. Hospitals, like insurers, have structural advantages and disadvantages that drive a lot of the costs. Hospitals with monopolies can negotiate higher reimbursement rates from insurance providers. Price shopping matters, but only once you get people covered, otherwise they don't have the leverage to negotiate lower prices. That's what insurance is for, almost literally.

An attempt to standardize medicine prices is called single-payer. What other mechanism do you see to address that?

To address your last point first, Biden's plan which allows you to purchase medicine from overseas is one way to do it.

To speak more generally to everything else, my shortlist absent one or two items is primarily about boosting competition. It's certainly not going to fix everything, but the idea is to provide people with enough options to drive down price. I'm generally of the opinion that we haven't done nearly enough to try and fix our current system in meaningful ways to have gotten to the point that we are talking what is essentially a rewrite of healthcare rather than reform.

I'm sure there are other things you could mention that would also achieve this, and I'm not necessarily against any of those.
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RoadsterUFO posted...

cmiller4642 posted...

Spooking posted...

Taxpayers pay for abortions? Nope.

Churches can start paying taxes if they want their pro life message to start spreading into my life.

In what way is this a damn argument? I really dont care if some woman wants to be a deadbeat and fail to take responsibility for the consequences of having consensual sex with a man who is an even bigger loser than she is, keep me the hell out of it. Im not banging the chick, I dont even know her personally, thus I have never ever met her. In what way is someone like me obligated to be forced to fund her services?

Just because someone has an abortion, doesnt mean theyre a deadbeat.

Holy fuck, just shut the fuck up and never talk again.
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Stop debating people like AnCaps who have no empathy and nothing but spite for their fellow men and women. Theyll never come around because theyll never see the same value in human life.
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