Ep. 1351 Medicare for All, and Other Disasters

Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, discusses what's really wrong with health care (hint: it isn't a lack of government involvement) and how to fix it. Subscribe to the Tom Woods Show:

Ep. 1351 Medicare for All, and Other Disasters

52 thoughts on “Ep. 1351 Medicare for All, and Other Disasters

  1. The day after they outlaw private health insurance I’m going into business on the black market selling illegal health insurance. Getting really tired of these economically illiterate narcissistic sociopaths.

    • I’ll pay for it :). Not to mention we could decentralize healthcare in the black market and innovate competitive services that don’t need insurance at all. I mean America’s healthcare back in the 50s didn’t have health insurance back then. I like to see that style in a decentralized black market coming in the future.

    • +Krod7435, LOL at this point that may be our best hope because I really don’t see it going the other direction any time soon.

    • I’d like to see Medicare dismantled. Keep Medicaid, dismantle Medicare especially when considering that boomers especially white ones ought to be fucking white.

      Property values with dirt cheap and we’re talking about a nation that had a Federal Housing Administration that was only providing highly subsidized loans to white while redlining Blacks and other minorities. Statism destroyed Black downtowns with their various landuse changes and well calculated highway constructions that cut through Black neighborhoods. All that means that a pale person ought to be wildly wealthy and hence the older generation doesn’t need Medicare .

  2. INSURANCE COMPANIES ARE NOT CHARITIES. If insurance companies were forced to cover pre-existing conditions then what are you insuring against?

    • And they changed the risk so your risk level is the same at 20 as it is at 60. That is not insurance either that is the evil boomers fucking over their children.

    • +N Brown Actually it is the not mentioned obesity racket that is going to bankrupt nations left and right. While we will continue to see the mainstream ignore the fact that most developed nations do not have single payer systems like Canada or US, the delusion that obesity can just continue to be paid for is not going to last. Economic devastation is going to follow and it won’t be nice either.

    • +Usufruct Empire free market healthcare is not what the US has.

      “58% of US community hospitals are non-profit, 21% are government owned, and 21% are for-profit…Healthcare coverage is provided through a combination of private health insurance and public health coverage (e.g., Medicare, Medicaid).”

      Is that free market economics to you?

    • +Trevor Doge absolutely. It really doesn’t matter how you classify a hospital. You understand what non-profit means…right? It doesn’t mean you can’t make a profit. It just means you can’t show one. The real money is in insurance. How you define a free market is different than how a capitalist defines free market. You think competition. A capitalist thinks the destruction of competition. All your major insurance companies are owned by the same institutional shareholding firms. In order for competition to be destroyed you need the freedom to do it. You need a free market.

    • +Usufruct Empire you really should listen to more of Tom Woods if you still have these notions that capitalism destroys competition. Even if an entrepreneur doesn’t want competition, they still have to compete to get to a point where they corner the market.

      Even then, there is nothing stopping a competing company from starting up and challenging the established business.

      But if you still think that the US healthcare system is free market, despite medicare, medicaid, the VA, public hospitals, insurance laws forbidding individuals from getting insurance across state lines, etc… then you are sorely mistaken.

    • +Trevor Doge it’s not a notion…it’s a proven fact. Capitalism isn’t creative people starting businesses and competing in a free market. Capitalism is the purchase and consolidation of creative people’s ideas and businesses. How does a law that prevents people from purchasing insurance across state lines benefit the federal boys? Who comes up with a law like that? And if the same controlling shares of all these insurance companies are held by the same institutions…then what difference does it make anyway? You have to ask yourself what is going on.

  3. In the 1950s and early 1960s anyone could buy a healthcare policy for $5.00 – $15.00 per month. It even covered preexisting conditions. And then along came government.

    • +Ed Waggoner Sr.
      I don’t know how they did it but suffice it to say, it was accomplished and was done so without government intervention. Of course, medical technology and diagnostics were very different 60 years ago.

      I recall recently speaking to a devout Leftist, now her mid-60s who is a vocal advocate for socialized healthcare. Among her dad’s belongings she found a medical bill from when she was a child. She had to admit, healthcare was more affordable to everyone back then, regardless of income level.

    • +Usufruct Empire LOL. We have upwards of 200 governments in the world. Maybe even more. While we can ignore third world ones, even Scandinavian nations have huge household debts surpassing those held by Americans, high degree of inequality which is what is generating the hatred from abfi-immigrant far right groups and yet people like you still believe that there is this rosy state out there.

      Gotta say, keep it at it because everthing time some fanatic on the entire spectrum goes batshit crazy on innocent people like in Norway and these murderers even have fangirls online, all I see is the contradictions of statism. Those great Nordic public schools helping exporting Islamists even to the middle East or fascists in their immediate neighborhood.

    • +Roy Pinas isn’t a state a body of people united under one government? And isn’t government a fundamental set of rules and principles that determine the character of a nation? So what do you want Roy? A weak state? One that can’t even stop human beings from being sold like cattle. You want a weak state like Libya…where your fellow Negros are put in cages, castrated, and sold…you know…like the good old days of the Trans-Saharan free market. And also China is enjoying the benefits of free market capitalism…I mean Marxism…in your little ancestral stomping grounds. Free market capitalism has been soooo good to Africa…a little more should work out just dandy. Wouldn’t want any socialist ideas like diamonds and gold belonging to the people festering in the minds of the black man.

    • You know you might have a job opportunity there kicking around in the red soil for those transnational free market capitalist corporations.

  4. If you pay with insurance your doctor has a contract with the insurance company that states the doctor gets paid no matter what the results are.

  5. Is it just me…or do others also believe that part of the reason why health care is so expensive is because most people have insurance? Any time you have a middle man who has nothing to lose in the transaction between the buyer and the seller prices are higher.

    • +Roy Pinas In an unregulated free market medical policies would vary in deductibles from $0.00 to whatever the consumers asked for, and priced accordingly. Not having health insurance for the past forty plus years I have found doctors willing to cut pretty good deals for pocket cash.

      I had a friend, RIP, though not wealthy had better than $500,000 in assets: nice house, expensive furniture, two nice cars and money in the bank. We, the producer/taxpayers, paid all his doctor and hospital bills for the last twenty-five years of his life. When he died his kids go the house, furniture, cars and money. Such a deal.

      I had another friend, RIP, who “served” in the Navy during the Korean “war”. Of his three years of active duty he spent a year at sea during the war cruising the Mediterranean Sea. He went to VA doctors and hospitals for free for as long as I knew him, about 25 years. He was never wounded, not even a scratch.

      Yep, I sick of it.

    • +Ed Waggoner Sr. Exactly. I personally pay well over the initial $1400 per annum median drug tab just in out of pocket fees. It upsets me to see the darlings of societies get handouts because there just happens to be more of them.

      Mind you, my situation is hardly the extreme seeing that if someone is hit with Cystic Fibrosis, that will economically destro anyone in any English-speaking nations. That is because it is largely confined to Nordic people and so a largely British stock don’t give a damn about such tokens. We would rather find obesity treatment, women health despite much higher costs than men and tell everyone else to wait in line. A truly free market healthcare system would bypass this.

  6. I’m a libertarian but I know that the government is not “broke.” That’s what MMT explains. We need to move past this rhetoric and refute the flaws of MMT and government intervention. That’s how we get ahead.

    • that’s a good idea. I will start referring to it as crony statism from now on. I don’t like the negative association it makes to capitalism.

    • +Evander Farson It always was statism. For thousands of years states controlled us and it was monstrously evident during feudalism. Top down command by unproductive feudal lords who would sabotage feudal productivity in order to lengthen the enslavement process. If a member of the mobility felt offended by your lowly presence, it was game over and all this misery was justified by the ultimate human quest of finding twisted. That is why you always saw monarchs getting killed by another bunch of tyrants who had to be backed by the disgruntled peasants merely continue the same bullshit. Say you join the British to get rid of the Ottoman, now you’re supplanting them to some Arab nationalists, then US and then another Arab state with misery being the result in every iteration.

      Fortunately for humanity classical liberalism derived from the Italian Renaissance solidified the argument for inate individual rights and the importance of private property rights. The English enlightenment enabled the industrial revolution and due to those outside of the nobility acquiring power incomparable to their non-noble ancestors throughout human history, Marx was able to produce his Marxist ideas. Capitalism is the source of all the alternatives we see now and the hazy, vague solutions we see here are merely an attempt to bring us back to a more aggressive version of feudalism. The reset is all about taking everything we take for granted and I’m certain life in a corporate-dominated West is far superior to totalitarian Monarch-led states of the Gulf.

    • +lightcaesar Far from progressive indeed. It is really about a subset of people getting paid substantially more. In our case, it is essentially white women who happen to be older.

      That is what uncle Bernie and Trump wants to do. Somehow maintain insolvent entitlements and social security rackets while telling everyone else to drop dead.

  7. What I don’t understand in her argument, why health care in the US is so expensive (not an American here), is why competition between insurances wouldn’t eradicate these exuberant profits (according to her, the insurances pay much less to the doctors and hospitals than what they charge the insured). Even if the insurance is paid for by the employer, it would be in the employer’s interest to find the cheapest insurer for a given policy, making the insurers compete for the insuree’s employer as customer. I think I even once heard that insurances’ profit margins aren’t that high after all, but I could be wrong. So to me, it seems more like supply of medical service is being strongly restricted, by government regulations and cartelized action from doctors, pharmaceutical companies, etc. Eradicate those, and prices would probably fall.

    • The per capita cost isn’t that much higher than say Switzerland. Median prescription costs without insurance is around $1400 per annum and really depends on your ailment.

      Single payer doesn’t cover everyone and this is why white American life expectancy are far higher than Australian aboriginals despite being largely urban and under a single system. In fact poorer American who have access to single payer medicaid don’t live a along as middle income Americans who don’t have a government solution.

  8. In canada, our healthcare is like your VA. Great if you need pills or break your arm. If you need surgery; expect to wait a year minimum. Also, 5 hour ER waits get kinda old.

    • I listened to progressive talk radio once and the guy was complaining about the VA using the exact same criticism people use against socialized healthcare, then of course the answer was more funding. These people are stuck in a feedback loop.

  9. Why is it that only Dr. Shiva is discussing the Group Purchasing Organizations and how this middle men are wanting to keep prices high
    in the American Health system. There are three large GPOs that control the costs of supplies to hospitals.

  10. What is she talking about? The government shares risk all over the place, rivers, coasts that flood. If you live in a flood plain and have affordable flood insurance it is because of government intervention. Not saying it is right just reminding you they do that crap already.

  11. Medicare for all in a world where most developed nations don’t have single payer systems is probably as disastrous as nativist Commies deporting 30 million illegals from pro-immigrant cities.

    In both cases we’ll see costs skyrocket. On the healthcare front incentivizing a largely preventable obesity racket is just a terrible idea as it is even devastating UK with calls of NHS denying services to these slobs. Meanwhile forcefully deporting 30-something million devastate local economies that heavily subsidize these redneck rural towns via generous and illegal cash transfers. I guess scores of dead people who protest mass deportations ( don’t count me as one who’d be doing anything like that) probably is slightly more fucked up.

  12. Why would “medicare for all” ban private insurance that duplicates the public insurance? Can someone elaborate?

  13. This was a great episode! Tom asked great questions and I got one of my burning questions I’ve had for a while answered- why do insurance companies allow hospitals to charge so much for their services? Because they don’t pay the full bill! How deceitful. That’s what I suspected though. I’m going to write a blog post about this and embed it. Thanks!

  14. Medicaid is an ATTACHMENT of all your wealth, they apply a lien as son as you die- 15,000 a month Medicare die by Medical Error, must be coincident

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