> If you end up inheriting money from a distant uncle, you have to pay back.
If you inherit money from a distant uncle, your uncle is presumably no longer alive to utilize state provided long-term care and you don't have to pay anything back. You're trying to contrive a counterexample that simply isn't applicable.
> Medicaid is not "free" there are requirements, but assuming you qualify, there are hidden costs. Like for example.
Totally different program (medicaid nursing home care) and not relevant because (1) it isn't medical care and (2) someone who has assets to draw down from is, by definition, not poor.
> If after 4 years they want to gift their children with a few thousand euros to pay, for example, for their marriage, they don't have to worry about it.
This isn't a realistic scenario (at least in theory). Medicaid nursing home eligibility is evaluated on a case by case basis and penalties are only incurred if the Medicaid applicant's intent is to defraud the government (i.e. you can't give away your money for the sole purpose of acquiring government benefits).
I can't speak for the entirety of the Europe but from my experience with certain countries in the EU, there is a pervasive culture of avoiding risk at all costs in favor of stability. The culture extends from the government to investors and even employees.
Government has no appetite for creative destruction and pushes policy favoring large incumbents over upstarts. Investors have no appetite for risk and only seek conservative investments. The best minds (that don't leave the EU) would rather work for large companies, schools, government, etc. than at smaller, riskier organizations that may not be around in a few years.
My family in Europe thought I was a loser and/or crazy for leaving a job as an adjunct professor to work at a 100-person startup. It makes no sense to us but it's understandable to someone who views landing a lifetime cushy bureaucratic job as the gold standard.
> is 1 really true? we have elections every 2 years for it. how many periods of time have we had no change in control of the senate or the house for 4 2 straight elections? what about fo 4 straight? vs how many times we've had dual term presidents? (serious, don't know the answer to that question, though i could probably look it up)
1) Congressional leadership tends to change hands less often than presidential.
2) I'd argue that the two powers are separable. The subgroup writing the rules tends to be different from the one executing them. There's also nothing stopping these groups from consulting with one another.
You don't even need to look as far as Canada to see what single payer healthcare implementation will look like in the US. Hospitals in the US that disproportionately serve populations on Medicaid/Medicare are notorious for their poor quality and consistent underfunding.
The US has universal healthcare. If you're poor or elderly, you have access government provided insurance. If you're near poverty, you have access to government healthcare subsidies. For everyone else, it's illegal to not participate in an insurance plan.
"for-profit medicine" is a gross mischaracterization of US insurance. Half of US healthcare expenditures come from the government and a significant portion the other half isn't even "for-profit" e.g. the largest private insurance provider in the US by far is literally a not-for-profit organization.
What makes you think such an amendment would have enough support to pass? Prior attempts at Social Security reform which diverted as little as 15% of assets away from treasuries were incredibly unpopular.
> Policy-wise, I would like to capital gains reform and strict responsibility for congress when making financial decisions (eg no more "borrowing" from SS/Medicare, pass a budget as required in the Constitution, etc).
I see this sentiment repeated often, but what does it mean exactly? The government has borrowed from SS, for example, since its inception in the 1930s. The entirety of SS assets are held in government debt and all efforts to diversify these assets have become politicized as "privatizing SS".
What happens when the other country isn't willing to sell? Consider a war or other disaster e.g. in the months before the pandemic, China stopped the export of face masks and other PPE, resulting in shortages in hospitals around the world.
> Amazon promoting its own brands isn't much different from a supermarket offering its own brand items. Apple isn't a monopoly in phones because of Android. And Google's search is so inherently tied to selling ads as a business model that separating them is a difficult argument -- plus search competitors are just a click away, as evidenced by how much Google pays Apple to be the default.
But these aren't the complaints being bade, at least not the ones in the lawsuits we know of so far. The Google lawsuit, for example, targets its practice of paying companies to make it the default search engine in order to maintain it's monopoly on search. It isn't seeking Google divest from its ad business.
That being said, there's no reason search can't be separated from the ad business.
This isn't an argument over the merits of the ACA. Many of are fine with Universal Healthcare but not with deluding ourselves into thinking that it's a free lunch. It's a statement of fact intended to address the false premise that we don't know the causal effect of the ACA on various healthcare costs.
We know exactly what it was as we have direct evidence as to what actions employers took in response to it e.g. increased premiums, increased out of pocket minimums, reductions in coverage, etc. The result is that, pound for pound, the same healthcare is more expensive.
> Growth in healthcare costs also slowed in the years after ACA was passed as the various provisions were phased in:
This is unsupported by the chart. In fact, it shows the opposite: the largest decreases in healthcare spending growth occurred before the passage of the ACA. That aside, the parent comment is seeking the causal effect of the ACA on healthcare costs, not a low correlating trend.
It's very rare to have direct proof of the effect of an economic/regulatory intervention, but luckily, in this case, we do. We've had a decade a survey data that indicates exactly what the effect the ACA had on employer provided healthcare was.
Some relevant highlights:
* More than one-third of organizations now have increased out-of-pocket limits, in-network deductibles and/or participants’ share of premium costs in response to ACA. More than one in five organizations have increased copayments or coinsurance for primary care, increased participants’ share of prescription drug costs and/or increased the employee proportion of dependent coverage cost.
* The excise tax on high-cost group health plans (a.k.a. Cadillac tax) is considered the top ACA cost driver beyond 2015. Since 2011, a steadily increasing percentage of organizations has taken action to avoid triggering the excise tax — a trend likely to continue. More than one in ten organizations already have adopted changes to prevent them from triggering the tax, 21% are working on changes and 28% plan to act sometime prior to 2018. Only one-quarter said changes were not necessary either because they have no high-cost plans (23%) or because they plan to pay the tax (2%).
That being said, the year following the passage of the ACA saw a large anomalous spike in employer healthcare costs that wasn't present in Medicaid/Medicare. It's almost undeniable that this was due to the ACA.
> And that is a risk assessment lenders would need to make. This is how all debt works.
This is irrelevant as the federal government is the owner of nearly all student debt, which is how they are able to forgive them in the first place. Student loans were de-facto nationalized under Obamacare.
Not as contradictory as the speaker is making it out to be. The organization can be poorly managed but still price out competition via a state subsidized business model that would be unsustainable for anyone else.
> high amount of start-up capital AND high regulatory hurdles AND the low margins
Not independent variables. The large wired broadband ISPs already enjoy economies of scale (access to capital, army of lawyers, etc.) and operate at slim margins. An independent ISP would need to reach the same size just to get the same near-zero margins.
That being said, there is a market for independent ISPs, but they tend to serve specialty customers where margins are much higher.
Then you wouldn't be inheriting anything in the legal sense of the word. That's why it's a contrived scenario -- it doesn't exist in reality.
Besides, the point is moot, as Medicaid nursing home care isn't Medicaid medical care, which is what the original topic was about.
> My parents were nurses, they weren't completely poor so they surely had to pay for it, but not rich either.
The government here heavily subsidizes the healthcare plans of people near poverty (up to 4 times the poverty level), not just the poor.