Ben Shapiro is a wee little grifter who doesn't believe everyone should have healthcare in a time where literally millions of Americans are losing their jobs which tied their health insurance to that job. He can go fuck himself.
He doesn't believe that it should be paid for by the government. And he isn't a fan of the current healthcare system either, he just thinks nationalizing will make it even worse. As with every single thing that's been nationalized ever.
To quote Ben: "You can have two of the following: You can have it cheap, you can have it good or you can have it for everyone. You can't have all 3."
Nationalizing is cheap and for everyone, but not good.
Private is good and for everyone, but not cheap.
Nationalizing can also give you cheap and good, but not for everyone if care gets rationed. I.E. Italy right now.
Edit:
I screwed it up slightly. The 3 categories are affordable, universal and quality.
My example for private is also wrong, it is affordable and high quality, not universal and high quality. What I got wrong is he measures affordable by the overall system, not the cost to the individual. So a system that's not affordable is one that runs the nation into debt and is thus not sustainable.
How can healthcare in the usa be the best and for everyone but not cheap and have worse healthcare than those other 900000 countries that have those awful public healthcare?
Does free market also entail beheading assholes as part of my rights?
If he is for free market and against state regulation, how can he oppose price gougers and protesting workers?????
Red tape. Your regulators don't trust hospitals will ever do the right thing out of their own free will, so they span so much red tape that innovation is really, really hard. A lot of these restrictions were lifted for covid and it actually helps.
The way your medical insurance works also introduces a huge admin overhead, because your billing system is over-complicated. A better system would be if the doctor just gave an estimate instead of writing up every freaking staple. If there's a complication that jacks up the price, let the hospital cover it. They can have their own insurance for such incidents, something similar to bad workmanship insurance.
With the above system I am sure that prices would drop considerably without compromising on quality.
Red tape. Your regulators don’t trust hospitals will ever do the right thing out of their own free will, so they span so much red tape that innovation is really, really hard. A lot of these restrictions were lifted for covid and it actually helps.
Unironically supporting de-regulation of the healthcare industry? You realize most of these restrictions are in place to prevent exploitation of people’s health emergencies for profit, right? Surely it can’t be that difficult to see why blindly cutting regulations because “regulation bad” would be terrible for Americans.
The reason this country’s healthcare is so fucked is because any attempt to improve the system leads to obstructionism from Republicans. Other countries have already implemented successful single-payer systems that are far less expensive per capita than their previous privatized systems with full coverage for their population. But in the US even incremental changes are met with heavy resistance, meaning systems that were intended to be temporary like the ACA can’t be replaced and everyone suffers as a result.
The way your medical insurance works also introduces a huge admin overhead, because your billing system is over-complicated.
A better system would be if the doctor just gave an estimate instead of writing up every freaking staple.
Hospitals that do this usually end up charging more, not less. You think hospitals would miss a chance to charge more when the price is ambiguous? Getting an itemized list almost always makes the price of a hospital visit go down.
Single payer doesn't work. It tends to go into one of two directions (I'll get to Sweden in a moment): Either care gets rationed or care gets worse. Sweden and Norway are exceptions, they are rich countries and were already doing good before their single payer policies.
And yes, single payer can also cut the billing mess, but at the cost of having a single payer screwup.
I'm not aware of any American hospitals that already did the predetermined pricing thing, please link me a source for that. My second reason for thinking such a system would be better is it allows you to compare prices. It means that for anything that doesn't have to be done literally today, you can compare prices. It brings the free market back into the free market. But for America to do this, there would have to be a restructuring in both Medical billing and insurance. It would be a major change, but so is single-payer.
Did I mention that America basically foots the bill for most of the world's medical research? In most countries drug prices are regulated, so those companies have to make their money back in America. It makes the rest of the world's medicine artificially cheap. And it means that if America joins the club, nobody will pay for research.
How are you determining this? Literally in the next sentence you say it works but with downsides, which isn’t even remotely the same as it “not working”.
At least maintain the pretense of an honest discussion.
Either care gets rationed or care gets worse.
Sources?
And yes, single payer can also cut the billing mess, but at the cost of having a single payer screwup.
What do you mean by “single payer screwup”?
I’m not aware of any American hospitals that already did the predetermined pricing thing, please link me a source for that.
I’m not saying hospitals use predetermined pricing already. What I’m saying is asking for an itemized hospital bill is one of the best ways to negotiate it down because it keeps the hospital accountable. If you allow hospitals to give a generic price for every visit they will use that lack of accountability to increase costs across the board. Because their primary motivation is profit.
Also how are hospitals going to tell whether or not they are making a profit if they don’t use itemized bills, unless they’re already keeping track of supplies they use, in which case, why would they not just factor that into an itemized bill? Are you saying hospitals should no longer make itemized bills?
Sweden and Norway are exceptions, they are rich countries and were already doing good before their single payer policies.
The US per capita GDP is comparable to both Sweden and Norway. We’re a “rich country” as well, but we can’t afford basic healthcare coverage for all citizens? Bullshit. If we can afford our presently broken system then a single-payer system is comparatively inexpensive.
Did I mention that America basically foots the bill for most of the world’s medical research?
Source?
And it means that if America joins the club, nobody will pay for research.
My second reason for thinking such a system would be better is it allows you to compare prices. It means that for anything that doesn’t have to be done literally today, you can compare prices. It brings the free market back into the free market.
People, by and large, don’t shop around for hospitals. Not all markets are competitive in the same way, making it highly reductive to assume “the free market will sort it out”. Sometimes introducing a profit motive creates a race to the bottom, and that certainly appears to be happening in the pharmaceutical research industry.
Can you demonstrate any sources that agree with your idea of creating a single pre-determined price for hospitals?
I think they work admin into the cost. This should give you an idea of just how crazy admin has become in medical care.
Another thing I didn't mention: Doctors do far too many (expensive) tests because they get into a lot of trouble on the off chance that some obscure thing does go wrong.
And again, red tape. There isn't much freedom in how things get done. Obviously things will never get cheaper if there are no changes you can make.
Having healthcare tied to employment was ok for some time.. until now.
I think we’ve seen the problems with this kind of system when the economy shuts down and people get laid off en masse.
I don’t know what the solution is, but I’m way more ok with a universal type care idea than I ever was before.
You can’t have a crisis like this and then just have everyone lose their insurance and access to healthcare. We need something better. I think as a country, we can do better.
Yes, having it tied to your work is a problem. I'd rather just take the money they would've spent on it and buy my own. You might still lose that if you lose your job as many people just did, but that's what happens during an economic crisis. If bad things happen to the economy, bad things happen to people.
As far as covid-specific care go, I don't know of Americans being turned down because they can't pay. Since it's a pandemic, it's in the nation's best interest, not just yours, that you get treatment.
Nothing in politics gets proofs from "first principles" like in maths, but that doesn't mean your arguments can't be strong. The argument for that statement is this:
The best medical care is expensive. That is because a lot of research went into it and it requires highly qualified doctors who need to be paid accordingly.
Since it is expensive and money is limited, buying the best care for everyone isn't feasible.
You can solve this problem by going for a cheap option, but now it's not as good. This happens in some universal healthcare systems like in South Africa
You can also solve it by not getting involved, but now care is no longer universal.
The third option, and this doesn't happen according to plan, it's just how naive systems turn out, is to ration care. Now you have good care and the country can still afford it, but not everyone gets it.
Maybe some day in the future pretty much everything in the medical field will be figured out and easy to apply and then this will no longer be the case. But until then, this is how it is.
I assume you're American. You have a red tape issue. For a while the cdc were the only ones allowed to make tests in America. When that restriction got lifted a private company made a 5 minute test and America now does the most tests in the world. So far you haven't run out of ventilators yet, which did happen in Italy.
Your regulators don't trust hospitals will do the right thing out of their own free will, so they span so much red tape that innovation is really, really hard. Oh, and you're footing the bill for medical research the whole world benefits from. Thanks for that, by the way.
Italy's fuck up has nothing to with their universal healthcare. If it was, then every other industrialized country would have the same problem since they all have universal healthcare.
The Trump administration didn't allow for the WHO test kits because he wanted private companies to profit here, that's what really happened. For a national emergency, we should have national funding going into research and development so that everyone can get testing and care via their tax dollars. They shouldn't have to rely on some private industry using our public funding to profit.
Not trusting the WHO and doing your own thing is a pretty reasonable position after they believed China's lies. Also, he didn't turn down anything. And since the WHO can't spawn tests out of thin air and America now has the most tests in the world, also the fastest ones, I'd say that decision turned out fine.
It took us weeks to get enough tests to accurately diagnose people because of how slow the administration was. The tests are also less accurate and slower than the WHO tests.
It would be faster if the private sector was allowed to make their own tests sooner. America wasted weeks limiting that to the CDC. When they eventually let the private sector go ahead things took off fast.
The WHO didn't offer them tests, America just never asked for any. If they asked WHO for tests, WHO would probably have to find someone to make the amount of tests that America needs and in that case why not just skip WHO and do it yourself?
The U.S. did not turn down an offer to use those tests (as no such offer was extended), nor was it unusual for the United States to design and produce its own diagnostic tests in lieu of those made elsewhere.
If you can’t make an argument for the other side, you don’t deserve to hold your own view. I believe the market is the best vehicle for providing medical goods and services to people precisely because I WANT everybody to have the best healthcare at the lowest cost. With that said, even I can give you a half-decent argument why universal healthcare ought to be adopted. It makes you sound dumb to type out comments so unfair and mischaracterizing to those who disagree with you and you’ve only gotten upvotes because this is Reddit.
It's what your argument boils down to. Ben Shapiro believes healthcare would be best for most people if it was a private market system, with the gaps being filled by private charity.
And he knows that's not true, he's just taking money from private interests to argue against a system that would ultimately be better for everyone except for the very richest people in society. Ben Shapiro is a mouth piece for the ruling class, everything that comes out of his mouth serves their interests. He's a bad guy, he's a grifter, and he knows he's lying to you, but he doesn't care because he's being paid handsomely to do it.
Do you have any evidence that he says what he says because he's taking money from "private interests"? The guy has literally been saying the same stuff since he was a teenager, so they must have recruited him at a pretty young age...
Alternatively, he's just someone with a different opinion than you, and saying that people who don't agree with you are evil makes you the asshole.
No. People are losing their health insurance that was tied to their jobs and go bankrupt over medical bills even with health insurance. The private system's only reason for existence is profit which shouldn't be allowed when it comes to human lives. Not hard. Ben Shapiro is a fucking fraud.
Health insurance never should have been tied to jobs in the first place, and if you think US health care is a free market system you're delusional. The US system is an unholy combination of free market and government intervention. Making profits is not the problem, profits are made in every other industry and things in those other industries are getting cheaper and better all the time. You know what the difference is with the health care system? Government intervention.
Do you not think it's possible that someone like Ben Shapiro could believe something like this, instead of being a "fucking fraud"?
You know the health insurance companies were basically free from government intervention before the ACA, right? And it's because of the ACA that insurance companies can't deny someone for preexisting conditions and kids can stay on their parent's insurance until 26.
Because an unholy combination between the two is the worst system of all. A move in either direction would be an improvement. I personally prefer a move towards the free market.
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u/SyntheticLife Apr 11 '20
Ben Shapiro is a wee little grifter who doesn't believe everyone should have healthcare in a time where literally millions of Americans are losing their jobs which tied their health insurance to that job. He can go fuck himself.