That's funny, because apparently about 30 million have no coverage...

I'm not enrolled but one of my adult sons uses AHA. It's a high deductible plan that includes dental. The plan closely matches the one I have through work in terms of benefits, although his out of pocket is higher as are his deductibles, it is administered by United Healthcare (under a different brand name), and is cheaper than what I get through my employer. He uses the same Doctors my wife and I use. He gets a minor subsidy because of his income level.

Anyone can go to healthcare.gov and look through the available plans if you are really interested in them.

I see it all the time. Often I call the VA to see if they have beds for a transfer or to get an authorization to allow admission here. Back in the day, 1 out of 10 got transferred, and then a year or more in Trump’s term that changed. It could have been because of him or not. I assumed he wanted, or put someone in power who wanted, to try to control costs better by not paying other hospitals. It honestly could have been something that was before him related or unrelated to the ACA. It is so hard to know. Now 9 out of 10 patients are transferred to the VA. Although with COVID that number has fluctuated. Regardless, VA insurance often pays other hospitals to admit their patients when their hospitals are full. It is sometimes tied to a service that is outside of their care, but not necessarily.

Yea that happens when they can’t handle it, the active duty side does the same thing when their systems are so overloaded that the medical readiness is suffering or it causes increases in non-deployable troops. It happens but guess who gets stuck with the bill when they try to go outside the network without any justification? They do and 100% of the bill at that.

Typically plans on the exchange are slightly higher for what you get. Mostly this is because the group is a higher risk group than employees from certain employers. The insurance on the plans can’t exclude anyone, and they can’t jack up the price based on someone’s pre-existing conditions like before ACA. What they might learn over time is that there are less people who are high risk on the exchange than they thought because those people are likely on medicaid or medical, and there may be more affluent/low-risk people on the exchange than they thought. These could be contract workers or people that own their own business (no employees). That could be why the prices on California’s exchange went up less than 1%.

$781/mo with a $7600 deductible was my cheapest estimate. No dental. Didn’t see anything ab vision. 50% coverage for hospital, X-ray, specialty, labs and oddly prescriptions drugs.

Hard pass.

Yeah dealing with medical stuff while active duty is a huge PITA. You’re pretty much stuck with whatever is available on post, unless you can somehow manage to get some type of referral to somebody in network in the nearby area.

Being retired is much easier lol

“Oh you broke your arm, Motrin and water - walk it off.”

Oddly every single one of my close buddies that broke a bone on AD had to have them reset multiple times (2-3).

Lol you survived. Congrats to you sir! I was done after 2nd contract.

I legit had a doctor try to prescribe me mucinex like 5min after telling him I was allergic to Mucinex; more specifically guaifensen.... the active ingredient in Mucinex :lol:

The “drink water and take ibuprofen” stereotype is hilarious though because it’s so accurate.

Apparently this is the future:

https://www.metatube.com/en/videos/3...ass-Car/embed/

(Yes, this is a joke, but it's funny nonetheless)

I've never seen a "vision insurance" program that wasn't really just a discount program off list price. It's always seemed like a waste to me.

In general though, health insurance really isn't insurance, its a prepaid medical plan with a maximum payout.

Basically, it's like if when you bought auto insurance it included all the standard maintenance and mechanical repairs for free along with your catastrophic loss (accident) insurance.

What we have is more like a cost sharing program.

Here's a good article that explains it better than I did.

I’ve had BCBSs blue vision for a few years, they cover most everything even some of the cost of new frames/lenses every year. I don’t really consider this particular plan a discount program because I have never had to pay anything outside of the premium. But I get what you’re saying. Maybe I just have the Cadillac plan.

I have my insurance via Covered California (which essentially is ACA in California).

Comparing it to my previous Kaiser plan from my previous employer, it is identical premium-wise.

The only thing different is any type of subsidies you might get from Covered CA, which is based on your income.

Much like car insurance, health insurance varies wildly depending on the type of plan (HMO/PPO) as well as where you live.

I pay ~$300/month for my Kaiser HMO. But I also have never needed prescription drugs in my life, so I went with a Bronze plan instead of something higher.

Covered CA offered me dental + vision (via VSP) for an additional ~$20/mo. The vision part essentially gives me a free checkup a year + about $100 credit towards contacts or frames.

Thanks for chiming in.

Is this a self only plan? I agree, there are a lot of variables. My question is more geared towards how your coverage and service have been but it kind of seems like you don’t need it. lol

The concept of basing insurance rates off of capability to pay is asinine to me. We can talk ab how insurance companies come up with premiums but it’s pretty widely known. So it’s progressive rates for the same service. That is another hard pass for me. To me, that’s like charging someone more for a gallon of milk because they earn more.

Who said I don't need it? Just because I have no medical condition doesn't mean I don't need health insurance.

It's like saying "I've never been in a wreck in the last 20 years, so I don't need car insurance"... which I have not had in 20 years on a public road. But that isn't the point of insurance.

Insurance is there to cover risk. Whether or not I use the insurance coverage is a moot point. To view health insurance as different from any other type of insurance is missing the big picture.

Every person in their life will need health coverage at some point, whether they want to or not. Most of the coverage needed is at birth (when it's under your parents or whomever took care of you until you were an adult) or when you are dying/dead (whether it is from an illness or natural death). To assume "one can pay for their own" is ignoring the above two situations. Am I supposed to go back in time and pay my parents back for the coverage (or lack of) when I was a child, when I was born?

But that's not a valid comparison.

The fundamental concept of health insurance being subsidized is just a general concept of the fact that a healthy population costs less to maintain than an unhealthy one. So if you were to provide more coverage (overall) then you'd pay less over a period of 30-60+ years.

A lot of this gets into very specific types of economic modeling for socio-economical conditions that are too difficult for a few discussion posts here, but at some point it needs to be emphasized that a healthcare subsidy is NOT the same as someone paying more for a good or service.

The premium I pay ($300/month) is me, unmarried 41 year old male in California on the Kaiser Bronze plan. The only difference before/after ACA is that California offers a subsidy up to ~$300 depending on my level of income, and it goes away entirely once my income is above a certain threshold.

That's all. What I pay for my healthcare does not change, what the state subsidizes changes. So it's like a gallon of milk is the same for everyone, except those that are poor can pay with food stamps from the state.

Pump the brakes. I wasn’t being accusatory. I was speaking figuratively and lightly suggested you were healthy. I never suggested that you should not have health insurance.

I didn’t even challenge anything you said in your post. I just said I disagreed with progressive insurance rates based on capability. Which you have no control over. So why the hostility?

Who’s paying for the subsidies?

You understand the whole point of what I said is that I have a problem with the whole “depending on level of income” thing, right? You ripping apart my comparison is futile because you’ve disregarded the reason for the analogy.

I’m okay with people having subsidies to support those who cannot afford to purchase it (just as I am with SNAP) privately but Medicare already does that to an extent. The whole point is that I’m not okay with bending people over the barrel for shitty coverage and premiums triple what they cost in the private sector.

If you think what I wrote was hostile, then you should re-read what I wrote.

If I was trying to be hostile I would not have bothered to type more than 2 words.

That would have been entertaining.

Civil discourse is for those who can separate their emotions from their argument. If you can’t do that, don’t bother responding.

FWIW, I read the same thing you quoted in the earlier post and your response is the confusing one. I did not read the quoted post with the same emotional connotation that you seem to have projected on to it.

Civil discourse works best when you don't start trying to insult and exclude the other party.

I attempted to clarify. I had no ill intentions with what I said. I thought the “lol” would have been a pretty clear indication that I was kidding. I’m interested to know what you think the “two words” would have been?

Civil discourse requires civility - it’s in the name. I have no qualms with excluding people incapable having civil conversation - speaking generally. It ceases to be a conversation when one party is angry.

Are you under the assumption that one party was angry? I mean, mav can certainly speak for themself, but my interpretation of the statement was that hostility simply does not require a longer explanation of his position like what he provided. It was explained by mav that your assumption of his tone in the prior post was incorrect and then he described how you can determine whether he was being hostile in the future.

Your next post seemed to be a rather aggressive personal challenge for civil conversation as you put it.

To rewrite what I understood the intent to be:
"I would be entertained to see you be hostile towards me. I don't believe you can separate your emotions from your argument so you have no place here." Or in layman's terms, "Come at me bro or gtfo".

If that is not the case, please clarify your intentions. As I said before, I am confused by your recent posts, so perhaps I am mistaken?

It was definitely defensive over something I did not feel he needed to defend. I even clearly said that I wasn’t challenging his post.

The follow up he posted I felt was passive aggressive towards me. I said that would be entertaining because I assumed the 2 words would have been “f*** you/off” and that would have been humorous to me because I probably would have laughed.

go back and read what I wrote.

Had I been insulted or wanting to insult you, I would not have bothered to type out an explanation for my viewpoint of healthcare (in general).

My first response was written that way because many people that "don't want to pay for other people's healthcare" use their own healthiness as a justification for that. But by that reasoning, a safe driver doesn't have to pay for car insurance.

Unfortunately a la carte insurance does not work, because you'd then have to (and be able to) insure almost any type of thing/action under the sun, and the whole idea of using insurance (as a blanket) to reduce/spread out risk/payout is out the window.

Go back and read what I wrote, perhaps you can ignore my retort about me not using health insurance and you can see the rest of what I wrote lines up with my argument that health insurance (and healthcare in general) is something that everyone uses at some point in their lives, and for a lot of healthy people this usage is when they are born.

... or am I being combative again? I don't know.

I did, a few times to be sure. Do you understand that I wasn’t trying to say you shouldn’t have insurance? I was not challenging your point of view but get your personal experience with ACA.

I get why you say that but your health is none of my business. I merely wanted your experience with coverage regarding ACA.

I agree, I have changed policies many times to get one that actually feel like I’m getting my money’s worth.

I read that, I just think that what I said was probably confusing (as it appears). Again, I wasn’t looking for the reasons why you chose ACA but rather how your experience has been with regard to coverage and accessibility.

lol “If I was trying to be hostile I would. . .” is passive aggressive in my eyes but that’s up for interpretation.

... and I already posted that, but apparently what I posted wasn't what you are asking about.

So I'm not sure what else to add, because you keep asking about my personal experience when I already told you what my experience is (identical before/after ACA) and what is different (subsidies based on income). I never changed healthcare providers, I only changed who I bought insurance from.

Ahh, I was confused as why you were saying Kaiser Bronze and Covered CA. It’s interesting that the price didn’t change. I did some research to find the difference between my current plan and going thru healthcare.gov and it’s a major difference in price. Interestingly healthcare.gov redirects you to Covered CA (for CA residents - my state doesn’t have an exchange like that). And also CAs subsidies have significantly higher income brackets than my state.

My state offers $1300 in subsidies but after that the plan is still $1453/mo. Thats ab $1060 more a month than I pay now.

Which is why I hate the whole discussion of comparing healthcare across state lines, because it's just like car insurance, it varies wildly based on whatever your state does (or did not do).

Most of the US that signed on to ACA is using what the federal government put together. In many states that was reduced to a single healthcare option...

For me in California, what I was offered before and after using Covered CA didn't change anything.

That's fair. There are a lot of variables that have to be considered. I checked on Covered CA's website for the cheapest insurance I could find for my brackets (because I had done this with my states previously) and the cheapest I found was $681 which was only $100 less (still better than my state) than the cheapest I could find in my state. I didn't bother to look for one that closely resembled my current plan because I didn't have time but I imagine the difference would be somewhat consistent.

My biggest argument is that I want the ability to change if I want to. I recently left USAA (which a lot of people think is one of the best insurance companies out there) because they screwed me over on some home owners insurance stuff twice. I want the flexibility to do just that without feeling price pressure. I believe a federal mandate for universal insurance would eliminate that flexibility. On top of that, in order for universal health insurance to be truly successful (financially), everyone must be on it or at least the bulk of the population. And based on my experience with public insurance and the overall cost burden on myself, I'm a hard no to the universal/ACA option.

To me, it seems like Covered CA is onto something good (but less ideal for higher incomes), however, I have not looked at the how the subsidies have impacted state spending so I can't say how effective it is.

https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/3927

Middle of this has a summary of the different proposals for subsidies based on income % above FPL and the fiscal impact.

Here's a summary of last year's Covered CA subsidies and what types of families pay what:

https://health-access.org/wp-content...et_6.24.19.pdf

Again, all this is if you get your insurance via Covered CA. If you have something via your employer you won't be offered the Covered CA option, I had to fight them for coverage at the beginning of 2019 when they tried to deny me due to me terminating my previous employment in late 2018.

As for universal healthcare, the first few years will be universal hatred towards it. A good example is Taiwan... they put it together during the a lame duck period in the presidency of the first elected president in 1995, then endured several years where the population hated it. Now it's a system that is not perfect but has given a lot of benefit to the public, and also one of the most effective at combating COVID-19 so far. My mom (70+) can easily walk around any part of Taiwan with zero fear of catching COVID-19, and two weeks ago they had the first local transmission of COVID-19 in 8+ months. Can't say that about the rest of the world, let alone the US...

But as is the case with most public policy implementations, the benefits are not seen for years (or even decades). It's just a matter of whether the public has the patience to see it out, and unfortunately that will never happen in the US.

Interesting report, was the proposal passed? If so, then state subsidies are funded by the penalty revenue?? I feel like that’s a rather shortsighted solution if the goal is to encourage the 3.5m uninsured to buy from the state exchange. I believe that was a big question by the legislature.

I was just using it at a comparison to see how it compares state to state.

That may be but the amount of variables that factor in to the implementation of significant universal policies like that make the outcome ultimately unpredictable.

I see that Massachusetts will also ban sale of gasoline powered cars by 2035 and the article mentions that New Jersey has the same plan. Fortunately it only applies to new vehicles.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/news...4x2?li=BBnb4R5

Can we try fixing our borders and getting rid of the millions of illegal aliens before we attempt M4A?

that depends. do you like blueberries?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronav...s-unharvested/

Visa holders aren’t illegal immigrants though.

That farmers gonna have bigger problems because 60% of his sales are restaurants.

you haven't talked to many famers.

the one's i know learned 20 years ago to not dig too deeply into any info the pickers give unless it's flat out wrong. it's quite 'normal' for many pickers to have 3-4 different social security numbers, with different names.

it's funny at first that a guy was jose last year, and juan this year, but gets sad really fast when the realization kicks in how abysmal our immigrant system is.

but no one else will pick produce...

I fixed it.

Why?

Why not?

I know a lot of farmers but I generally don’t ask them ab the workers’ citizenship status.

Don’t you think it’s a problem that there are those with 3-4 SSNs? Shouldn’t we do something ab it?

I’m not arguing for booting people out who are just trying to make a living. Im arguing that if people are wanting to roll out a system that will give citizens free healthcare, don’t you think we should have an effective immigration policies first. I do.