My reader is more interested in universal health care than UBI, for good reason:
UBI is an interesting idea, but I’d more interested in universal health care at reasonable rates.
For example, I currently pay more for private health care insurance than I would pay for Medicare parts A (hospital), B (out patients), and D (pharam) if could buy all of those. (And part D is higher priced than it would need to be except Congress explicitly forbade CMS from using its size to negotiate better drug prices.) And Medicare has far lower deductibles and copays than my current plan. (And I’m counting actually paying for part A here, which normally, if you’ve paid into Medicare via FICA deductions during your work life, is “free”, i.e. has no premium. The Medicare website is amazingly helpful on this point.)
If I recall the data correctly, a major cause of homelessness is bankruptcy. Medical calamity is the number cause of personal bankruptcies in this nation, and most of those medical bankruptcies are filed by people who had health insurance.
For most of the 99%, paying for health care is a critical component of staying solvent and hence, safe and healthy. That Medicare can do so much more with so much less money, despite various political hamstrings such as the drug pricing scam, than private industry insurers demonstrates just how greedy and detrimental to society they are. And that doesn’t even begin to address other things driving sky rocketing health care costs, such as immensely profitable hospitals, excessive end of life treatments, lack of continuity of care, etc.
Yes.
I’ve been reading a couple of interviews on Vox with Trump voters who happen to use the ACA, wherein the interviewers ask if they really believe the GOP would knock down the ACA and replace it with nothing (the replies have included “I didn’t realize they could change laws” and “I didn’t really believe them”). While a couple of interviews are indeed a slender reed to hang a conclusion from, it does occur to me that the GOP may have wedged itself into a crevice filled with blue ring octopuses (highly poisonous). How so? One of the their campaign promises was to shutter the “disastrous” (their terminology) ACA.
If they do so, they may screw over a part of their base, who’ll either die of embarrassment or scream bloody murder – right into the microphones of the waiting Democrats, who’ll happily broadcast the wails of agony.
If they don’t, the rest of the base will abuse and revile them, and probably indulge in the filthy epithet RINO, pushing the party yet further into the fever swamps. Or the health insurance industry may abandon ship on them, although heavens knows there’s nothing more than a life raft out there once they get off the capsizing GOP liner.
And, as Steve Benen notes, the attempt to sidle their way out of this has already begun:
The rhetorical shift on health care among congressional Republicans is also worth keeping an eye on. After years in which GOP lawmakers said the scope of “Obamacare” is a national scourge that’s tearing at the very fabric of American society, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) recently told reporters that repealing the reform law affects “a relatively small number of people.”
Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) added, “We have an Obamacare emergency in a relatively small part of the insurance market.”
