1mo ago

Trump Medicare pick Dr. Oz says uninsured ‘don’t have right to health’ in resurfaced clip

www.rawstory.com Trump Medicare pick Dr. Oz says uninsured ‘don’t have right to health’ in resurfaced clip

Mehmet Oz, widely recognized as television’s “Dr. Oz” and President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to head Medicare and Medicaid, has sparked controversy over resurfaced remarks from a 2013 speech, where he addressed the balance between personal and governmental responsibility for the uninsured.Dr. Oz...

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If everyone just said fuck it and stopped paying their insurance, it would crash not just those companies, but domino into taking out the entire stock market.
Like, these companies are worth so much, and they invest in others and people invest in them. If their entire revenue stream is stopped at once that's it.
Which makes it kind of a nuclear option, one I've intentionally not mentioned and haven't seen anyone else either.
But the day may be coming
- Corporations mainly pay for health insurance. Imagine employee's reactions being told they were getting cut off. Not going to happen.
  
  If the employee cancels their plan, the corp ain't going to keep paying.
  I don't know why someone would read my comment and imagine I meant corporations should cancel their employees insurance...
  But I think that's what happened here
  
  We don't get to drop out of plans at a whim.
  
  I'm on VA, so I admittedly don't know much.
  But to my knowledge marketplace can be cancelled at any time, thru employer may only be certain times.
  But I do know you can stop any non court ordered payroll deduction at any time...
  Some dumbasses even do it for OASDI and tax withholding and then act shocked when they get the bill at end of year.
  
  You have a point I missed!
- Interesting idea, but you’d need to get employers on board. Many of whom are publicly traded companies.
- When someone stops paying their insurance, they stop getting healthcare. Most people don't want that.
  It's kind of like saying "If everyone said fuck it and set their car on fire, then oil companies would suffer". Yes, but they aren't the only ones who would suffer.
  
  When someone stops paying their insurance, they stop getting healthcare.
  When people pay their insurance, they don't get healthcare either.
  
  No, they generally do get health care. In fact, most insured adults give their health insurance an overall rating of “excellent” or “good”, even if they are in poor health.
  It's true that there are horror stories, but those are not the majority.
  
  Which is why there was so much sympathy for the UHC CEO and why his killer is universally hated.
  
  29% of people have "very unfavorable" views of Luigi Mangione, compared to only 13% of Brian Thompson. The vast majority believe his murder was not justified.
  
  It sure is neat seeing under which circumstances lemmy regards polls as reliable.
  
  Were you one of the Lemmy users who thought Trump was "universally hated"? If so, you were in for a big surprise there too.
  
  No, I knew better. It's why it was so maddening watching centrists interpret all warnings as trying to get him elected.
  
  Reading the rest of the survey makes me belive that americans either don't know what a good insurance company looks like or that they must lie to themselves
- A big salty tear.
- Surely people will have better access to health care once the system has “crashed”!
  
  Well yeah? Once it crashes you can rebuild it properly.
  
  Well, the people who survive can rebuild it as they see fit, anyway.
  I have no reason to think that the general public will suddenly be more organized than the surviving oligarchs.
  
  If only the oligarchs survive, they'll quickly die off from having nobody to actually keep the world running.
  
  This is one thing that really scares me about automation and AI. Without a doubt, they will replace as many of the functions that humans are responsible for with automation and software as is possible. Once they have things up and running, there's nothing stopping them from doing whatever they want and not caring about the human cost.
- Which is exactly why we’ll never have single payer: It would crash the economy and put millions out of work.
  Downvote me all you want but it’s the exact reason Obama gave for not pushing single payer
  
  I’m not sure how that puts people out of work? Still need people to process the claims, they would just work for the government vs the company. Which for them would probably be better long term getting federal benefits and retirement.
  
  It's only a couple companies at this point. There's been so many members over the years. Economy would be fine. We probably had more tech layoffs this year than would lose their job from closing these leeches
  
  But that would go against small govt and the GOP cannot let that slide.
  
  I always figured a great deal of those people would move to government work. They already have the expertise.
  
  The problem is that there are large parts of those companies that are replicated multiple times that would be made redundant.
  Each company has an IT department, legal department, marketing department, and claims department, among a lot else. Most of those would be redundant or unnecessary in a single payer system.
  Part of the reason single payer is more cost effective is eliminating administrative overhead. And “administrative overhead “ is code for jobs.
  
  Any job that gets between a patient and the care they need is a job that needs to die.
  
  No doubt. I'm an antiwork radical and think nobody should have a job. But the one thing both political parties and the public seem to agree on is "more jobs" so anyone who says "less jobs" isn't going to get elected.
  
  And what will you do with all these unemployed people?
  
  Checkmate, guys. We can't endanger some jobs in order to help everyone. Sorry. Guess we'll just keep doing this failure of a system that keeps a few rich from the rest of us struggling.
  
  No answer huh? I'll send a million beggars to your doorstep. Jesus Christ you people are children. Can we actually talk about how this works?!
  
  Nope. Obviously, pointing out the reality of the situation and asking to discuss possible ways to overcome the very real and very difficult barriers the capitalists have erected means you actually secretly agree that those barriers should be in place and therefore think we should do nothing instead.
  I say this as a lefty AuDHDer: the amount of neurodivergent black-white thinking in leftist communities is extremely concerning. Kind of comes with the territory, probably, given that authoritarians want us dead, but it can create some serious infighting. It should not be controversial to acknowledge the fact that in our current climate, single payer is almost impossible thanks to the opposition from the capitalists.
  
  Do not question comrade! That's the liberal social media vibe. You have to carefully couch your statements or get burned down for asking.
  
  I'm sorry, I actually took your message as the typical shutdown response aka "but my jobs" as a reaction to any change. For example when Clinton came to WV coal miners offering a gateway to alternatives and was told coal jobs or nothing. Granted it was campaigning, but the mindset of resistance to change is very strong in an established community or industry.
  To answer you more seriously (which was hidden in my first reply), some jobs have to disappear when there are major changes. But others can open up as well, and many of them will have some commonality. I guarantee there is no plan of transition for these same companies when there are mergers or bankruptcies, so what do those people do in those cases? They find a comparable job. I thought our economy was doing great as far as employment and opportunity, this shouldn't be a big deal if all that is true (I think it's a lot of smoke and mirrors, but it doesn't change the point).
  Change hurts people, there's no denying that. But so does stagnation, and I think without change more people get hurt while others profit. That does need to change.
  Outlining and discussion of what needs to happen is difficult in social media. Few have the time or knowledge to do a proper debate and rebuttal, cite sources, and follow the many chains that develop. But it's interesting that we all do seem to acknowledge that what we have sucks, and something needs to happen.
  
  And that seems logical! But we've talked about combining the local city and county for cost savings. Turns out, it wouldn't be too big a deal.
  Not like if we doubled the population we'd need the same amount of people approving construction planning. We'd pretty much need double. And that's one of 1,000 examples.
  But you're spot on with admin overhead! That would indeed drop. Not by half, as in my example, but it would certainly drop. The biggest drop would be profit. And we can all agree healthcare shouldn't run like private enterprise.
  I'm totally with you. Yes, got single-payer would slash thousands and thousands of jobs, maybe a million or three. And yes, that would fucking hurt. It's like the Obama quotes you posted. We didn't start on a level playing field, we started in a ditch.
  Lemmy hates our sort of discourse. "NO! It's all very simple! Why won't you talk simple!"
  
  I’m 100% on board with Medicare for all and have been since 2016. I’m just trying to recognize logistical and political speedbumps
  
  Lemmy: NO! SIMPLE ONLY!
  You're fighting an uphill battle.
  
  How?
  
  For the same reason not paying our insurance will crash the economy: Big parts of it would go out of business.
  
  The obvious solution is to put a plan into place to transition to a new system over time. There's no reason it has to come all at once, unless there's a viable way to do that without collapsing markets.
  The conclusion to any problem is never, and should never, be "Welp! The problem is too big to fix now! Guess we'll just leave it as it is!". Every problem has a solution. Most problems have more than one.
  Further than that, as a recently unemployed working class person who was paycheck to paycheck before my freelance gigs dried up a month and a half ago (slow season started early this year), fuck the stock market. Why should I worry about the extractors losing money when they have already created a system in which, through no lack of effort on my part, I have nothing left to lose. I'm in the top 10% of technicians in my city, in a very niche field, in one of the largest cities in the US, and I can't afford my bills because my industry is dominated by a single monopoly. Anyone who doesn't serve the monopoly directly either serves it indirectly, or feeds on its scraps. Small company owners (I've worked with many) justify paying people just slightly more than the starvation wages the monopoly doles out. Unions are gaining ground, but it's very slow progress and they haven't really expanded far beyond entry level positions yet, which I leveled out of well over a decade ago.
  Fuck the stock market. Fuck the rich. Why should I care about them when all they do is extract?
  
  I don’t disagree with you but I do not believe our government is capable of a decade-long transition to single payer.
  
  Why not? All they have to do is make a single payer option available. Make it functional and accessible, and people will switch to it as their current insurance policies end, or when they move to their next job. The health insurance stock market will likely initially dive, then stabilize into a long downward slope. I'm sure the feds have all kinds of "quantitative-easing" tools they can use to make the process less painful for the ownership class. Whatever pain they do feel would be a necessary consequence of the wrongs they have committed being made right.
  
  Is "the economy" code for how hard you can fuck yourself in the ass with no lube?
  
  "The economy" is code what for every single fucking one of us participates in. This notion that the economy only applies to the rich is sophomoric, and I'm being generous calling it that.
  
  So every other country with universal healthcare just doesn't exist or?
  
  And that has what to do with what? Cute quip though.
  If we remove a million+ jobs, yes, that will fuck shit up. Y'all have an 8th-grade understanding of the world. Upvotes means you're right, downvotes bad.
  As to what OP posted, it's like Obama said, we're not starting on a level playing field, we're starting in a ditch. Other countries started healthcare after WWII, did the right thing, for many reasons I won't go into here.
  Sorry, forgot where I was.
  "SIMPLE ANSWER GOOD!"
  
  I don’t know why I’m getting grief for agreeing with OP that eliminating health insurers would crash the economy.
  To me this is fine but most people won’t like it which is why single payer won’t ever happen without a revolution.
  
  Is not liking it the same as crashing the economy?
  
  I'm not suggesting you're wrong, but isn't there an obvious inefficiency here that reduces the standard of care provided?
  Like if a national healthcare system doubles the number of administrators involved, there will be less money available for actual health stuff.
  
  Yes, and the inefficiency of private health insurance creates thousands of jobs and powers a $2.2 trillion industry.
  
  Privatize ALL the health insurance companies.
  Reduce inefficiencies (fire all the parasites that don't do actual work, like the CEO's, etc)
  Continue operations as normal, but now with 100% guaranteed claim coverage.
  Over time, phase out the need for people to "deal with insurance" at all and make the whole thing transparent.
  
  The stock market has survived fire sales before and it will survive it again. Oops we got too large to easily stop has never been cause for anything except getting the stick out and beating them down to size.

183 comments