[tptacek]

Networks are very important with all kinds of insurance. The thing you notice when you switch from employer-covered insurance to ACA market insurance is all the fiddly choices your employer was making for you. You can say that having to make these choices is a process failure of the ACA, or you can say that having the freedom to make those choices yourself is a benefit of the ACA.

I'm not sure what M4A has to do with this, and, in particular, to relate this story back to the thread, you should be aware that Medicare drug benefit administration is also privatized, and that somewhere between 1/3 to 1/2 of Medicare recipients also get Medicare Advantage, a private insurance rider to Medicare that is largely defined by network restrictions.

[ddingus]

M4A has everything to do with this.

Millions of Americans have and are being harmed financially and or physically by this patchwork mess.

The other thing you notice is insurers treat people who they know will cost them much differently.

M4A will centralize most of this and will distribute cost and risk as widely as possible

[tptacek]

Could you formulate a response like this that addresses the point I just made, which is that Medicare also includes, for a huge chunk of its recipients, network restrictions, and for all its prescription drug recipients private insurance?

[ddingus]

For now it does. That will not always be the case, or should it be, the regulatory picture will appear very different than it does today.

Those things simply do not add value. They do help to make more money.

When health care is about making money, it is not about making people healthy. And it is not about cost either.

Very large numbers of Americans are both impacted in a negative way, and long past the idea of private insurers being good primary care vehicles. They aren't.

Private insurers should be forced out of primary care. If I had my way, doing that would be illegal.

There is a basic conflict of interest between an insurer making money and what is best for sick people.

I will tell you personally, the hell I have gone through, family members dead, others living with pain, financial damage, homes lost, I am very highly motivated to do all I can to see an end to our current, increasingly cruel and ineffective system. Talk about death panels. Yeah, happened to us. Unnecessary that it did too.

[tptacek]

So really your argument has nothing to do with Medicare? You're just using the term "Medicare" as a placeholder for whatever health policy you come up with? I'm not trying to be snarky: this is also what several of the Democratic frontrunners are doing.

[ddingus]

Your words not mine.

The original intent of Medicare is intact in the proposals a growing number of people are moving to actualize.

I am not coming up with "any policy"

I am contributing to the Medicare For All effort.

Does that clear things up?

[ddingus]

BTW: Totally get it. No worries.

I just reread this, and the TL;DR:

For very large numbers of people, the current arrangement simply isn't acceptable. The pain level on that has reached a point where those people are now motivated politically.

Medicare For All is an expansion of Medicare, and an augmentation.

Technically, part of what you said is right: Medicare is being used to reference policy modeled on, but does expand considerably on that which we know as Medicare today.

That's being done because people largely understand and like the part of Medicare being expanded on, and that's the part sans private insurers and the usual mechanics associated with all that.

The Dem front runners are looking to garner those health care votes. They aren't wrong to be doing that as for increasing fractions of those votes, a solid proposal that eliminates the harm potential present in our current system is a litmus test.

Cheers!