[chadbaud]

Another interesting datapoint is medicaid enrollment. It's WAY up. If you look at it over the last 18 years:

2000: Enrolled: 31,743,700 | % of country: 11%

2010: Enrolled: 50,314,600 | % of country: 16%

2018: Enrolled: 73,355,220 | % of country: 22%

Although there was an expansion in Medicaid in 2009, these numbers are still showing there are more people who can't afford the basics.

[ProAm]

Isnt a lot of this an effect from Obamacare? Forcing every American to purchase insurance significantly changed the insurance landscape in America for people both with and without insurance.

[chadbaud]

Yup. That's a lot of the growth between 2000 and 2010. I guess a better indicator would be the growth between 2013 (post Obamacare boom) and today. That has gone from 56,533,472 to 73,355,220.

[adventured]

Any other developed country provides free healthcare to its people, it's cheered and called a human right.

The US does it, and it's used as proof that the US is collapsing. Under your premise, if the US moves to universal healthcare it implies total economic collapse.

Medicaid didn't exist in 1960, that doesn't mean things were great for poor people back then, it was in fact far worse (see the homelessness and poverty rates back then, they were nearly twice what they are today). The US barely had any social safety net 50 years ago. Now it has one of the best social safety nets in the OECD and it keeps getting larger and more inclusive.

So which is it? Do you want free healthcare for more people, or do you want to take that away from everyone so we can pretend nobody actually needs it?

Beside that, healthcare expenses per person have roughly tripled in 20-25 years. Even the immense US median income levels - among the highest on earth - can't sustain that rate of increase. It's hardly an issue of affording the basics: when healthcare costs an average person $10,000 per year, it's clearly far outside the realm of being a basic.

In which developed country can poor people afford that healthcare cost? None. The middle class in most developed countries can't come close to affording $10k per person in healthcare expenses per year. Countries like Britain, Finland, New Zealand, etc. are at less than half that cost. About half of the EU would fall under Medicaid's income line.

[chadbaud]

I'm pro-universal health care for the US. Hell, I pay over $28,800 in health care premiums a year for my family. Not real happy with the status-quo.

What I'm saying is people are not able to afford healthcare and defaulting to Medicaid at a high rate. I think this is an interesting measurement of people who are falling outside of the planned economy. In the US, you "should" be able to afford heathcare, that's what is planned for. But, now we have almost 20% of citizens relying on Medicaid.

[darpa_escapee]

The Medicaid enrollment numbers are a bigger reflection of how little people are being compensated: in states that adopted Medicaid expansion under the ACA, only those making a certain percentage of the federal poverty level are eligible for the program.

In states that adopted Medicaid expansion, that usually means 100% to roughly 138% of the FPL. The FPL for a single individual in the 48 contiguous states + DC is $12,140.

Workers whose income is above the FPL cannot default to Medicaid, even if they cannot afford to buy insurance.

[dragonwriter]

> In the US, you "should" be able to afford heathcare, that's what is planned for.

No, it's not. Medicaid (both the original design and the ACA expansion) is exactly a recognition that everyone being able to afford healthcare is simply unrealistic.