solowingpixy
the resident car guy
No bio...
User ID: 410
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
4d ago
Maybe I'm that guy? I try not to be a bitch about it, and probably call out sick a day every year or so, but I'm prone to being whiny about being sick in a way that I'm not about being, say, physically injured.
Like, I'm sick right now, have been since waking up with a sore throat on Tuesday, and things have been trending more worse than better over the last few days. It's not worth going to a doctor (stocking up on real sudafed and maybe some throat spray, on the other hand, is on the to-do list for tomorrow) over, and I'm not seriously ill, but this sucks and is a crappy way to spend my vacation. My throat/tonsils are sore as fuck, I'm still freezing under this blanket, and the super dry conditions (visiting family in the desert when I live in the humid South) plus nasal congestion are not a nice mix.
Oddly enough, I don't think I ever caught Covid in spite of having a roommate hospitalized with it in the pre-vaccine days. If I did it was a light enough case that I couldn't distinguish it from "generic flu-like illness that's over in a day or so", or a really bad hangover.
Assuming that this person is correct and that ACA enrollment is increasingly becoming dominated by early retirees I would expect the enhanced subsidies to be reinstated fairly quickly A. because Bill and Shelly vote in midterm elections and B. because doing so is easier (and maybe cheaper) than expanding Medicare eligibility to 55+ or whatever.
I've already said that Mike Johnson's crusade against gamer NEETs on Medicaid is a smoke and mirrors show to distract from the fact that unless we undo the ACA's Medicaid expansion (which mostly covers the working poor), there isn't much we can tweak in terms of eligibility that will actually cut costs.
An unfortunate occurrence in the last few years is that the Great Recession through Covid era of stagnation in healthcare spending has ended and healthcare spending is again growing faster than the economy, such that we're rapidly heading for healthcare spending making up 20% of US GDP.
The above is why I assume that we're nowhere near a universal system. No country with such a system spends as much of their economy on healthcare as the US does. Germany is the closest and the US spends about 50% more of its GDP on healthcare than Germany. For reference, if we moved to a German level of healthcare spending we could nearly triple the defense budget (which is currently about 3.5% of GDP). For another fun comparison, what we spend on healthcare now is pretty similar to the entire revenue of the federal government. Put simply, I don’t think that the US has either the capacity to bring healthcare spending in line with other OECD countries (which would require mass firings and/or salary cuts that would hit a well-educated and engaged chunk of the electorate) or the ability to raise taxes enough to cover said spending, so I assume that the system will remain largely as-is.
Even if you’re cynical enough to regard health insurance companies as make-work programs for bureaucrats, they’re a necessary evil because they’re also the paypigs that keep the whole thing afloat. Privately insured patients are the only ones that medical providers actually make money treating (Off the top of my head, Medicare patients are close to break-even, Medicaid patients are a net-loss, and of course the uninsured are near-total write-offs.) and unlike House representatives are able to impose payroll taxes on corporations and the upper-middle class without getting kicked out of office in the next midterm.
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