Rebuttal to President Trump's claims that Medicare for all would turn us into Venezuela

dbell1989

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Oct 11, 2018
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I just listened to President Trump say we'd become like Venezuela if we extend Medicare to everyone.

Would taxes have to be raised by so much that our economy would collapse or be severely weakened? First of all, America not only "survived" a 90% marginal tax rate throughout the 1950s, we positively thrived. If we had the low marginal income tax rates for top tax brackets that we have now, we wouldn't have the Interstate Highway System (where do you think the money came from?) NASA wouldn't have received as much funds, the Soviet Union would have had its way in the world. Higher taxes aren't a good or evil in and of itself, within a surprisingly large range of tax rates, at least with regard to marginal income tax rates. The correlation between high marginal income tax rates and economic growth and prosperity has been greatly overstated. What matters is what you get for what you pay. A good healthcare system benefits all of us, rich and poor. Nobody's saying that tax rates won't be going up if some form of single payer healthcare is passed. But would tax rates have to go up to the rates of the 1950s? I don't think they would. Here's why.

If we extend Medicare to all citizens, and keep the same reimbursement rates for procedures and make no other changes, yeah, that would require us to massively raise taxes. But the whole point of single payer healthcare is that the government can choose to set the price. If you cut reimbursement rates by half, doctors would still be making, on average, more than almost all professions and well into the multiple six figure range. In actuality, reducing reimbursement rates for all procedures by half wouldn't actually lead to physicians' gross income being reduced by half too. Physicians would also probably perform more procedures to make up for the lower price per procedure so their incomes wouldn't drop by that much even if we cut rates. Granted, they probably wouldn't double the number of procedures (if they did, they'd make the same as they did before the rate cut), if rates were cut in half so Medicare would still be able to save some money by cutting rates in half, maybe by like 30%.

Also, the line between "unnecessary procedure" and "preventive care" is hard to define. If a doctor is incentivized to order more tests, there's a higher chance of many diseases being detected early, which could save even more costs and save lives in the long run. For example, detecting cancer early leads to markedly improved survival rates and less time spent on long-term care and palliative care. If Steve Jobs had some of his money to get screened regularly, he might have discovered the cancer before it metastasized, and he could have saved his life.

You could also argue that it's not fair to lower rates like that because doctors worked hard to get where they are and spent a lot of years getting educated, but first of all, do the interests of a single profession outweigh the interests of everyone else? Again, they would still be making more money than almost everyone else. Their compensation would still be comparable with pay in other first world countries, and they would still enjoy lifetime job security, great benefits, and prestige and respect from society. Those who claim that Medicare for all would mean doctors would be making peanuts are using scare tactics. Also, you could reduce the number of years of education required by allowing people to apply to medical school after graduating from high school, which is what most other countries do. There doesn't seem to be a difference in physician quality between graduates of US schools and those of other countries, where aspiring physicians apply to and go straight to med school from high school.

There's lots of ways to expand health coverage to all Americans through a single payer program. President Trump saying that it would turn us into a failed state like Venezuela is assuming that we just add everyone to the system and make no other changes. Well, even an idiot would know that this would bankrupt the system. Healthcare is a complex issue, and making one change inevitably will require us to make many other changes, some of which I've suggested above. But we have policy analysts and experts to handle these issues. We know that the problem has been solved to a generally satisfactory level in other countries that share our values, institutions, and way of life (the other Anglosphere countries).

And fundamentally, our population pyramid and incidence of health problems isn't that much different from other first world countries. If Americans were much older than other countries or we got sick much more often, then one could legitimately argue that single payer systems that work in these other first world countries wouldn't work here because of these fundamental differences in our population. But that's not really so. So it can be said that if Medicare for all ends up not working in the US, the problem isn't the concept of single payer itself, but the particular way in which Medicare for all implemented the idea of single payer.

The idea that America has to stick to a plan that was created 50 years ago is unfounded. It defies not only logic and common sense, but our nation's very history. If the Constitution itself can and has been changed numerous times ever since it was written, to say that a law that was passed 50 years ago cannot and should not be changed is an absurdity.

Last but not least, implementing a Medicare for all system in some form does not mean that there would be no private market for healthcare. In the UK, Australia, and Canada, you have a private system that coexists side by side with the NHS. And in America, we have both publicly funded schools and private schools. Does having a publicly funded education system, and supporting public education mean that you want to ban private schools, religious schools, etc? No reasonable person supports this position. Do parents who send their kids to private schools think it's necessary or desirable to end the public school system? Of course not. It's not a question of private vs. public in education; the two systems complement each other. We acknowledge the merits and place of public and private educational institutions, so why could it not be so with healthcare?

President Trump, we can keep our promises to our seniors, and extend that promise to all Americans.
 
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Single payer health care can marginally succeed if the sick and old are killed off early.
 
Obama: Granny doesn't need a surgery, just give her pain killers and let her sit in a wheelchair until she dies. THAT'S government run single payer healthcare.
 
Obama: Granny doesn't need a surgery, just give her pain killers and let her sit in a wheelchair until she dies. THAT'S government run single payer healthcare.

Under the GOp plan she doesn’t even get painkillers!
 
Obama: Granny doesn't need a surgery, just give her pain killers and let her sit in a wheelchair until she dies. THAT'S government run single payer healthcare.

Under the GOp plan she doesn’t even get painkillers!

I'm not working overtime to pay for shit government health insurance, while you people take my money and gift it to deadbeats to buy votes.
 
I am a Medicare "consumer," and it works fine for me. I buy supplemental insurance to cover what Medicare doesn't pay, and it's quite reasonable in cost.

Sorry, but the ramifications of "Medicare for All" are huge, and too complex for one guy to figure out.

And it's probably unconstitutional. Like Social Security.
 
I just listened to President Trump say we'd become like Venezuela if we extend Medicare to everyone.

Would taxes have to be raised by so much that our economy would collapse or be severely weakened? First of all, America not only "survived" a 90% marginal tax rate throughout the 1950s, we positively thrived. If we had the low marginal income tax rates for top tax brackets that we have now, we wouldn't have the Interstate Highway System (where do you think the money came from?) NASA wouldn't have received as much funds, the Soviet Union would have had its way in the world. Higher taxes aren't a good or evil in and of itself, within a surprisingly large range of tax rates, at least with regard to marginal income tax rates. The correlation between high marginal income tax rates and economic growth and prosperity has been greatly overstated. What matters is what you get for what you pay. A good healthcare system benefits all of us, rich and poor. Nobody's saying that tax rates won't be going up if some form of single payer healthcare is passed. But would tax rates have to go up to the rates of the 1950s? I don't think they would. Here's why.

If we extend Medicare to all citizens, and keep the same reimbursement rates for procedures and make no other changes, yeah, that would require us to massively raise taxes. But the whole point of single payer healthcare is that the government can choose to set the price. If you cut reimbursement rates by half, doctors would still be making, on average, more than almost all professions and well into the multiple six figure range. In actuality, reducing reimbursement rates for all procedures by half wouldn't actually lead to physicians' gross income being reduced by half too. Physicians would also probably perform more procedures to make up for the lower price per procedure so their incomes wouldn't drop by that much even if we cut rates. Granted, they probably wouldn't double the number of procedures (if they did, they'd make the same as they did before the rate cut), if rates were cut in half so Medicare would still be able to save some money by cutting rates in half, maybe by like 30%.

Also, the line between "unnecessary procedure" and "preventive care" is hard to define. If a doctor is incentivized to order more tests, there's a higher chance of many diseases being detected early, which could save even more costs and save lives in the long run. For example, detecting cancer early leads to markedly improved survival rates and less time spent on long-term care and palliative care. If Steve Jobs had some of his money to get screened regularly, he might have discovered the cancer before it metastasized, and he could have saved his life.

You could also argue that it's not fair to lower rates like that because doctors worked hard to get where they are and spent a lot of years getting educated, but first of all, do the interests of a single profession outweigh the interests of everyone else? Again, they would still be making more money than almost everyone else. Their compensation would still be comparable with pay in other first world countries, and they would still enjoy lifetime job security, great benefits, and prestige and respect from society. Those who claim that Medicare for all would mean doctors would be making peanuts are using scare tactics. Also, you could reduce the number of years of education required by allowing people to apply to medical school after graduating from high school, which is what most other countries do. There doesn't seem to be a difference in physician quality between graduates of US schools and those of other countries, where aspiring physicians apply to and go straight to med school from high school.

There's lots of ways to expand health coverage to all Americans through a single payer program. President Trump saying that it would turn us into a failed state like Venezuela is assuming that we just add everyone to the system and make no other changes. Well, even an idiot would know that this would bankrupt the system. Healthcare is a complex issue, and making one change inevitably will require us to make many other changes, some of which I've suggested above. But we have policy analysts and experts to handle these issues. We know that the problem has been solved to a generally satisfactory level in other countries that share our values, institutions, and way of life (the other Anglosphere countries).

And fundamentally, our population pyramid and incidence of health problems isn't that much different from other first world countries. If Americans were much older than other countries or we got sick much more often, then one could legitimately argue that single payer systems that work in these other first world countries wouldn't work here because of these fundamental differences in our population. But that's not really so. So it can be said that if Medicare for all ends up not working in the US, the problem isn't the concept of single payer itself, but the particular way in which Medicare for all implemented the idea of single payer.

The idea that America has to stick to a plan that was created 50 years ago is unfounded. It defies not only logic and common sense, but our nation's very history. If the Constitution itself can and has been changed numerous times ever since it was written, to say that a law that was passed 50 years ago cannot and should not be changed is an absurdity.

Last but not least, implementing a Medicare for all system in some form does not mean that there would be no private market for healthcare. In the UK, Australia, and Canada, you have a private system that coexists side by side with the NHS. And in America, we have both publicly funded schools and private schools. Does having a publicly funded education system, and supporting public education mean that you want to ban private schools, religious schools, etc? No reasonable person supports this position. Do parents who send their kids to private schools think it's necessary or desirable to end the public school system? Of course not. It's not a question of private vs. public in education; the two systems complement each other. We acknowledge the merits and place of public and private educational institutions, so why could it not be so with healthcare?

President Trump, we can keep our promises to our seniors, and extend that promise to all Americans.
When the government takes control of healthcare, what do you think will happen? I mean look how well they did with the Social Security lockbox..

 
I just listened to President Trump say we'd become like Venezuela if we extend Medicare to everyone.

Would taxes have to be raised by so much that our economy would collapse or be severely weakened? First of all, America not only "survived" a 90% marginal tax rate throughout the 1950s, we positively thrived. If we had the low marginal income tax rates for top tax brackets that we have now, we wouldn't have the Interstate Highway System (where do you think the money came from?) NASA wouldn't have received as much funds, the Soviet Union would have had its way in the world. Higher taxes aren't a good or evil in and of itself, within a surprisingly large range of tax rates, at least with regard to marginal income tax rates. The correlation between high marginal income tax rates and economic growth and prosperity has been greatly overstated. What matters is what you get for what you pay. A good healthcare system benefits all of us, rich and poor. Nobody's saying that tax rates won't be going up if some form of single payer healthcare is passed. But would tax rates have to go up to the rates of the 1950s? I don't think they would. Here's why.

If we extend Medicare to all citizens, and keep the same reimbursement rates for procedures and make no other changes, yeah, that would require us to massively raise taxes. But the whole point of single payer healthcare is that the government can choose to set the price. If you cut reimbursement rates by half, doctors would still be making, on average, more than almost all professions and well into the multiple six figure range. In actuality, reducing reimbursement rates for all procedures by half wouldn't actually lead to physicians' gross income being reduced by half too. Physicians would also probably perform more procedures to make up for the lower price per procedure so their incomes wouldn't drop by that much even if we cut rates. Granted, they probably wouldn't double the number of procedures (if they did, they'd make the same as they did before the rate cut), if rates were cut in half so Medicare would still be able to save some money by cutting rates in half, maybe by like 30%.

Also, the line between "unnecessary procedure" and "preventive care" is hard to define. If a doctor is incentivized to order more tests, there's a higher chance of many diseases being detected early, which could save even more costs and save lives in the long run. For example, detecting cancer early leads to markedly improved survival rates and less time spent on long-term care and palliative care. If Steve Jobs had some of his money to get screened regularly, he might have discovered the cancer before it metastasized, and he could have saved his life.

You could also argue that it's not fair to lower rates like that because doctors worked hard to get where they are and spent a lot of years getting educated, but first of all, do the interests of a single profession outweigh the interests of everyone else? Again, they would still be making more money than almost everyone else. Their compensation would still be comparable with pay in other first world countries, and they would still enjoy lifetime job security, great benefits, and prestige and respect from society. Those who claim that Medicare for all would mean doctors would be making peanuts are using scare tactics. Also, you could reduce the number of years of education required by allowing people to apply to medical school after graduating from high school, which is what most other countries do. There doesn't seem to be a difference in physician quality between graduates of US schools and those of other countries, where aspiring physicians apply to and go straight to med school from high school.

There's lots of ways to expand health coverage to all Americans through a single payer program. President Trump saying that it would turn us into a failed state like Venezuela is assuming that we just add everyone to the system and make no other changes. Well, even an idiot would know that this would bankrupt the system. Healthcare is a complex issue, and making one change inevitably will require us to make many other changes, some of which I've suggested above. But we have policy analysts and experts to handle these issues. We know that the problem has been solved to a generally satisfactory level in other countries that share our values, institutions, and way of life (the other Anglosphere countries).

And fundamentally, our population pyramid and incidence of health problems isn't that much different from other first world countries. If Americans were much older than other countries or we got sick much more often, then one could legitimately argue that single payer systems that work in these other first world countries wouldn't work here because of these fundamental differences in our population. But that's not really so. So it can be said that if Medicare for all ends up not working in the US, the problem isn't the concept of single payer itself, but the particular way in which Medicare for all implemented the idea of single payer.

The idea that America has to stick to a plan that was created 50 years ago is unfounded. It defies not only logic and common sense, but our nation's very history. If the Constitution itself can and has been changed numerous times ever since it was written, to say that a law that was passed 50 years ago cannot and should not be changed is an absurdity.

Last but not least, implementing a Medicare for all system in some form does not mean that there would be no private market for healthcare. In the UK, Australia, and Canada, you have a private system that coexists side by side with the NHS. And in America, we have both publicly funded schools and private schools. Does having a publicly funded education system, and supporting public education mean that you want to ban private schools, religious schools, etc? No reasonable person supports this position. Do parents who send their kids to private schools think it's necessary or desirable to end the public school system? Of course not. It's not a question of private vs. public in education; the two systems complement each other. We acknowledge the merits and place of public and private educational institutions, so why could it not be so with healthcare?

President Trump, we can keep our promises to our seniors, and extend that promise to all Americans.


FABRICATION, plain and simple. The only plan put forth for your side is the BERNIE plan; and to make it work while costing TRILLIONS, was to cut payments to doctors and hospitals by 55%. In essence, you will DICTATE what nurses and doctors can make, and make far less they would.

In the real world, we call that MARXISM, but coming from your side, that is a given!
 

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