Reply to What Medicaid population will lose benefits under this new bill?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think it comes down to 2 questions. And whether you are coming at these questions based on principle or pragmatism.

Is health care a right that we get for paying taxes?

That is what countries with nationalized healthcare believe - uk, Taiwan, s Korea, Japan, Sweden, etc.

If you don’t believe it’s a right, then to what extent should we provide Medicaid and Medicare to benefit us as a whole? We have Medicaid and Medicare because it might be cheaper to provide healthcare for 80 million people rather than have to pay for the fallout of not providing it. If we don’t provide healthcare, we have fewer people who can work, more homeless, more chronic illness, shorter lifespans, more maternal and infant mortality, more medical debt, fewer home purchases, fewer car purchases, fewer services hired, more uncertainty, and less income. It would decrease our gdp significantly.

Is the system deeply flawed? Yes. As an md who worked a majority of the time in county hospitals, it’s totally f’d up. We would fantasize about working at Kaiser or someplace where we didn’t have to deal with all the Medicaid bs. But the horse is out of the barn. Aside from the philosophical question of “why are we paying for so many people’s healthcare”, rescinding healthcare to millions of Americans is going to do a lot of harm. Some of them are grifters. Some of them have expensive medical needs that, to be brutally honest, are probably not worth it. But there are enough people who need this coverage to continue contributing to society economically. [/quote]

Not quite.

Medicaid is 32% funded by states and 68% funded by the federal government. 872 Billion total.

That means $872B is sequestered from the general economy and directed towards health care by fiat decisions of bureaucrats.

It also means $872B is not money not spent elsewhere. A conscious government decision is made to throw those funds at Medicaid.

Doesn't matter how successful or unsuccessful the program is. It's on autopilot and answers to no one on effectiveness. Don't underestimate the unintended consequences of that. Now, combine that with Medicare, HHS spending, CHIPS, and all the other entitlements and you start to see the problem.

A large part of our spending is on autopilot, it's spoken for, and answers to no one on effectiveness. It's a rigged program for providers and participants and it's a large part of our economy with very few market forces instilled in it. The providers are working in unison against the tax payer to maximize their payout. It's a big part of the "command economy" run from the ivory towers of Washington. And, it starves the rest of the economy who cannot compete for those allocated  tax payer dollars.[/quote]

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