[spoiledtechie]

It's a wonderful idea. Free healthcare for all. Sadly, it simply isn't sustainable financially. I think in the next 10 years alone it was supposed to cost tax payers 10 trillion and that money can't literally be printed fast enough and the debt our country holds, extremely unsustainable. If they did it cheaper or more cost effective, I would say yes, but financially, you can't.

[hsitz]

I'm not sure what you're talking about, but it's definitely not the ACA/Obamacare. The ACA has has nothing to do with "free healthcare for all", and is only tangentially related to free healthcare for anybody (by its relations to Medicaid and Medicare).

If you're talking about virtually every major country besides the U.S., though, they do have something close to free healthcare for all, and it does work, and it's actually a lot cheaper for their societies than the system we have in U.S.

[WaylonKenning]

It's not free healthcare for all. It's healthcare paid for the taxpayers, by the taxpayers.

And if the costs go up - it's because perhaps healthcare is better as a not-for-profit system rather than a for-profit system. Pretty hard to negotiate which hospital gives you the better deal when you're having a heart attack.

And I say this from a position of love in New Zealand - I wish you had normal government healthcare, like most other countries in the world. America spends 3x the amount on healthcare per capita compared to NZ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...).

[lend000]

An ACA thread always seems like a good time to throw in a plug for socialized medicine, but I do want to remind everyone:

Many people think that without ACA, the US healthcare market is free, which is why it has so many problems. This could not be further from reality. We have more government distortions in our healthcare market than countries with completely socialized healthcare. For example:

Medicare: socialized medicare for the elderly, which alone creates more distortion than a universal program would cause by inflating demand/prices for non-qualifying citizens.

Medicaid: socialized healthcare for specially qualifying poor people, which creates the same distortion as Medicare.

An oppressive FDA: which, coupled with overly-powered IP laws, grants de-facto monopolies in the medical product industry. We have an incredibly expensive and subjective medical equipment pre-approval process (as compared to a less-terrible FDA that would just be in charge of labeling, preventing fraud, and maintaining accountability in the event of incidents). Then there's the length and flexibility of patent protections in our current system (maybe we could cut those protection times in half, and patent trolling would not be a lucrative industry).

Oppressive occupational licensing: It's way too hard to become a doctor of any kind, even the kinds that don't manually put things into your heart. This will be a major battle as AI comes to the point where it can better diagnose conditions and largely replace generic/non-specialized pediatrics. Of course, the government will not make this easy.

Plus a slew of more minor things like malpractice regulation, and now the ACA (which is not so minor, and which will apparently be replaced with something similar).

If we cleaned up/removed all of the problems in the above and replaced it with single payer, it would be OK and we would have something similar to New Zealand/other countries with long wait times, not as much access to specialists, slow innovation, and a system where the government gets to decide who gets the last liver transplant and who dies. That would be a less distorted market than we have today, but ONLY if accompanied by fixing the aforementioned problems.

Or we could try going the free-ish market approach and try to find a much freer balance with the FDA/USDA/occupational-licensing/scrap Medicare/Medicaid,etc., which we do not currently have AT ALL. And maybe even declare health insurance fraudulent and pay everything out of pocket (accident insurance makes more sense as a hedge against risk, which is what insurance is supposed to be, whereas all people are expected to develop health problems at some point, with a probability approaching one).

[maxerickson]

Medicaid spending mostly goes to the elderly, disabled and children:

http://kff.org/medicaid/state-indicator/medicaid-spending-by...

(When people have no money left, Medicaid pays for nursing home care)

[anigbrowl]

Other countries manage it fine, and the costs here are overblown. Aetna claimed last year that it was pulling out of the ACA over costs, but it has emerged that this was a purely strategic decision after the FTC or the SEC declined to support a merger the firm wanted to enter into.

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-aetna-...

I reject the claim that 'we just can't afford it', and claim instead that the economic loss of not doing it is far greater, just not properly accounted for.

[spoiledtechie]

They are not. With 50-70% income tax on It's citizens, they are not just fine. Do your research. Long waits, little access to specialised docs. People are dying waiting in line.

[anigbrowl]

I come from such a country and your complaints are hyperbolic. I was in hospital a lot of a child and if we didn't have public healthcare it would probably have bankrupted my family. Public health systems are far from perfect, but they're still pretty damn good.

[pessimizer]

Entirely silly. Free healthcare is cheaper than what we have. If we could reduce the portion of GDP spent on healthcare to the level of what all other rich western countries have spent on their unsustainable universal healthcare for decades for better outcomes than what we have, we would be running surpluses.

Our crap healthcare is one of the biggest drains on the economy. What the US government spends on healthcare disregarding spending by individuals is still more per capita than any other universal health service.

[toodlebunions]

Do you mean the $10 trillion cost from repealing?

Here is republican senator Rand Paul on the huge budgetary expense of ACA repeal

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6AuIwR00T5g

[melling]

At 1:20 he says he's in favor of repealing ACA He doesn't like how it's being done.

[lend000]

Still in disbelief that Rand Paul did not win the Republican primary.

[aplummer]

It's sustainable in all the other first world countries. I don't understand what is different about the United States.

[sjg007]

You have no idea what you are talking about. Multiple countries have single payer and good health outcomes. And it doesn't cost 10 trillion.

[kchoudhu]

Please point me to the non-partisan, non-hack, non-goldbug study that tells you that the US cannot support its current debt load. The feeding frenzy at every new treasury auction tells me that there's plenty of space yet for us to issue debt.

Serious claims require serious proof.

[AnthonyMouse]

It isn't that no one will buy the debt, it's that the interest on the debt hurts the country. Every dollar in interest the government pays is a dollar it has to take from taxpayers and then not spend to the taxpayers' benefit.