(11-11-2016, 03:51 AM)Galen Wrote:(11-11-2016, 03:48 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:(11-10-2016, 11:21 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:(11-10-2016, 05:27 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: It's back to relying on the private sector. In other words, more expensive, fewer people covered.
You mean, less expensive, fewer people covered.
No, it will go back to the way it was before under the free market; much more expensive and fewer people covered. That's how it was; that's what the Affordable Care Act dealt with. Somewhat successfully, but not as well as real reform could have done.
Have you not been paying attention to what has happened in the last eight years? The cost increases have been much worse than they ever were prior. Really, when has government ever reduced the cost of anything?
The government was prohibited from negotiating any costs down. If there was an American price for a medication far higher than for a prescription medicine than the Canadian or Mexican cost, then the price that the manufacturers decided upon would be the price charged. That's only part of the cost-loading norm in American medicine.
In case anybody has yet to notice, net immigration from Mexico is now negative. Many Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, and (I assume) people married to such if not being Mexicans or Mexicans or Mexican-Americans are finding retirement far less expensive in Mexico. Of course if one can sell the family home in California for a fortune and can buy something far less expensive and of similar quality in a country compatible with one's cultural values, then selling the overpriced California home for its proceeds can allow one to live practically as an aristocrat in Mexico.
Mexico would be a very attractive country for me in political flight (the culture is not that exotic, as I have lived in California and Texas) except for the drug wars over the filthy money from the sale of illicit drugs to American addicts. Yes, Americans are making many Latin-American countries far less livable than they might otherwise be. D@mned American addicts, the ugliest Americans before Trump supporters became even more ominous!
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.