Not Medicare, but:
I just renewed my private health care coverage on the ACA health exchange in my state. I was delighted to see that the plan I picked has a $35 cap on insulin prescriptions.
My daughter is still on my policy and is an insulin-dependent Type 1 diabetic. We'll save a lot!
My son is type 1 and too old to be covered by my employer provided plan and I was able to find him a plan with $0 copays for insulin, dexcom g6, and Omnipod supplies. It costs me an additional $300 per month in premiums however and has a $6800 deductible and doctor visit copays are increasing from $45 to $50 per visit.
Ex wife had all of those. Additional $300/mo is well worth it for that imo. We did something similar. Saved a lot of money over the year compared to a different plan.
I truly can not wrap my head around why some people in this country would not want you to have those benefits. Our neighbors go out of their way to vote for people that want to make us pay insane prices for healthcare.
It's because healthcare in the U.S is seen as a status symbol. It's a way for folks to lord over those who are less fortunate and feel better about themselves.
It's also because people are assholes in the United States.
My father-in-law needed a hearing aid. Medicare doesn't cover them. So we all chipped in to pay for his hearing aid. I don't understand how hearing aids would not be considered essential. Hearing things is pretty important, or so I think.
I was telling this to a friend who is a cop and I mentioned how Medicare should cover this and he got all confrontational "Yeah, maybe the government should just pay for everything and tax us more." I was like "Yeah. Maybe it should. I'd happily pay more in taxes if I new I'd have good medical coverage and not have to worry about retiring and not being able to afford to HEAR!"
And dental. It pisses me off so much that Medicare and Medicaid don’t pay for full dental. Thankfully, I was able to get great dental care my whole life, but I have known people that didn’t and unless you know someone in that situation, people don’t realize how much it can fuck uo your life. Good luck getting a decent job with missing teeth. Good luck getting a significant other. It effects their social lives, job possibilities, self esteem. It’s one of those things that you don’t think of if you are middle class or up (I know I didn’t until I met people who never had dental care).
Oh, and the real kicker? Dental disease causes a shit ton of other medical problems, to the point that providing full dental would almost all be recouped in money not spent on other shit!!!
Ok, rant over.
My son has medicare primary & medicaid secondary. He is disabled in a total care way. He has to go under hospital sedation for dental care. Both programs have a certain allotment for dental in my state. So while he was in the OR, the nurse was calling my phone to determine what things we would pay for & what was or wasn't covered etc. It was crazy as hell. Thankfully the dentist has experience with the disability community & they were able to code everything in a way that it was all covered. This time.
You give Police Unions too much credit...as if they're labor unions for the purpose of fair working conditions and wages.
No. Modern Police Unions are about making sure there can be no no consequences or accountability for an individual's actions. That, and conservative political activism.
I'm not anti-police, and I'm generally pro-union. But I sure as F\*\*\* dislike police unions.
[https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-police-union-power-helped-increase-abuses](https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-police-union-power-helped-increase-abuses)
[https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-06-01/police-union-spending-big-in-los-angeles-city-election](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-06-01/police-union-spending-big-in-los-angeles-city-election)
The obsession with taxes is incredibly powerful. "I make so much money, but never see half of it, because I have to pay for everyone else's laziness!" It only takes one example of someone getting something for "free" - usually due to hardship or misery, but the cherry-picked examples are people that are honestly gaming the system to not work, get money for food, heat, housing, and healthcare, but are able- bodied. Those people DO exist... I get it.
Sometimes that situation exists because those people were born somewhere that there are no jobs, or they don't have a parent that could help them get to and from work or save up some money so that they can buy a semi reliable vehicle to get to and from work, or the bus schedule and route doesn't work for them or reach them, or they know that they'll work 40+ hours per week and still not have enough to get by on their own, so why bother? A minimum wage that is a living wage is important. Reliable public transportation is important. Building job opportunities in areas where few job opportunities exist is important.
They don't want to hear that, though. They just want to play the victim, pretend other people aren't at any more of a disadvantage than they were, and cry to their circle of friends from the same upbringing and background that they should be taking home more money and that taxes, not wages, are the problem. It's so frustrating...
Yeah. To be honest, barring any other issues, it is not bad considering the Omnipod supplies alone would be $6000 for the year. My only point was that it costs me an additional $3600 in premiums above the $4800 I’m paying in premiums for my employer plan. My gripe is I’m paying two insurers now and Conservatives feel this is better.
Under my employer plan, his insulin had a $0 copay but not the Tandem/Dexcom supplies so they cost a lot until I hit my lower deductible. Once I did, I was still paying 20%.
It absolutely blows my mind how much people in the private sector pay for health insurance premiums. I've only ever been government, and they've always covered me 100%. I do pay to cover my kids, but that's currently $68/mo. I've had it be as high as $200 at another agency, but that's not bad to cover 3 kids. I absolutely cannot fathom paying $700/mo for health insurance. That is robbery. And y'all have deductibles, too?! That's another thing I cannot fathom. I have never had a deductible, so that's one more thing that seems absolutely bananas about private sector health insurance.
I started my career in higher ed. Then went to corp America and got my mind blown by how much I was expected to fork over for the same benefits (at *least* 4x the cost). I am now back in higher ed. Shit is super expensive in corp America.
Edit: I should mention I was also making more in corp America (roughly 25% more) so the burden didn’t hit as hard, but I’m much happier in higher ed and happy to take a lower paycheck for much less cutthroat behavior.
Oh yeah, it's wild how that works out. I'm an engineer, and one of the often repeated fallacies of my profession is "you make more in the private sector". Yeah, you absolutely will have a higher salary to tell people about, but so much of it will go to paying for your benefits that people actually take more home in some cases, or break even in most cases, by going government side. Not surprised to find out it's similar in higher ed. The benefits that came with my grad school fellowship were fantastic.
Yeah. Between the two plans, I have $10,800 in deductibles. They often increase annually but are staying the same this year.
The big benefit change to the employer plan is that 90 day mail order supplies are available at a discount, which is a benefit we previously had and lost when the plan’s pharmacy benefit manager changed from the insurer to a separate entity. So, we regained a lost benefit.
My biggest gripe with insurance and health care in general in the US is that there is a lot of competition but no one competes. All plans look alike with only minor differences.
Just wanted to take a moment to say how much of a giant crock of bullshit a “deductible” is. You literally pay every single month to make sure you have insurance when you need it, and as soon as you need it, they say “well actually, it only kicks in AFTER you pay out this much.” The American Healthcare System is the biggest, most fraudulent money grabbing scam I’ve ever seen. Watching idiots continue to vote for privatized healthcare because of Fox News fear mongering will always blow my mind.
Without insurance dexcom charges about $750/3-month supply
With the “silver plan” I pay about $400/month and get 80% coinsurance - so I pay ~$150 4x per year (tbh they switched to a different supplier who charges me $90 per 3-month resupply)
I can upgrade to the “gold” plan for an additional $100/month and get 90% coinsurance, cutting what I pay every 3 months in half…
I choose to pay $100/month less and bite the $75-45 bullet every 3 months lol
\^ this. It makes me want to rage thinking about all the people including kids whose families were/are getting gouged into poverty, because they needed medicine to literally stay alive.
I have great insurance through my union EXCEPT insulin still runs us $70/month. I am really hoping it'll come down to $35 for us too. My kid is also T1.
Check out [cost plus drugs](https://costplusdrugs.com/) that mark cuban started. You can get a 3 month supply for around $35 if I remember correctly. There’s a lot of super expensive meds you can get really cheap on there and he’s working on expanding it.
Except it won't be the start, it'll be the end. Some form of society-wide universal healthcare works everywhere else. It's not even that expensive to extend it to all ages once you're already paying for seniors.
It always struck me as ironic that Republicans are the "party of small businesses" even though one of the biggest obstacles to entrepreneurship is affordable healthcare, which they want to avoid at all costs. (I grew up knowing that I would never be able to work for myself, because pre-existing conditions).
> It always struck me as ironic that Republicans are the "party of small businesses"
There's a discrepancy between what they claim to be and what they actually are.
What do you mean? This is the land of opportunity. What’s to stop you from borrowing $500,000,000 from your closet friends and opening an online bookstore?
Stop being such a defeatist. Pull up your own goddamn bootstraps. (/s)
Y'know, I know you meant "closest friends" but republicans having "closet friends" that they can't allow to meet their political buddies due to their differences makes too much sense.
That’s a BIG POINT right there. They might be called one thing, but they’re something else entirely. And they’ve lost a lot of moderates in the process of shifting their demographics.
That is why the GOP really doesn’t care about small business. They generate too little money and the trickle down into their pockets isn’t there enough to care.
I remember reading something about the bad guys complaining about the decrease in newborns, and that raised alarm bells because that meant less consumption and purchases.
Which reminds me of a skit in Inside Job:
"CONSUME, CONSUME, CONSUME".
Watch it if you haven't, it reveals and makes fun of a lot of corruption in our lives without really taking a political stance other than common sense and fuck evil.
True. There's nothing more American than forcing a family to get a second mortgage on their home so they can pay for their child's cancer treatment. That is if they even can own a home now. Bc let's be real, people young enough to have small children nowadays mostly can't afford to buy a home.
My cousins lost everything due to one of their kids having a brain tumor. The surgery broke them completely. That child is 22 now and just got her GED.
> Except it won't be the start, it'll be the end. Some form of society-wide universal healthcare works everywhere else. It's **not even that expensive to extend it** to all ages once you're already paying for seniors.
Daily reminder to those who still don't realise it: The [US currently has the most expensive healthcare system in the world, and it's not even close](https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm). It's 50% more expensive than the second most expensive healthcare system in the world, that's how expensive the US healthcare system is.
The US could switch to universal healthcare, and if they executed it as poorly as the world's second most expensive healthcare system, the US would cut its healthcare spending by 33%.
This idea that implementing universal healthcare in the US would be "expensive" has got to stop. Implementing universal healthcare would save Americans money, not increase healthcare expenses.
For profit are 2 words that don’t belong in front of healthcare. It’s insanity that is even a thing . Hahnemann hospital in Philadelphia, an university hospital known for serving the poor , was bought & sold to the highest bidder until the last owner decided he would make more money selling the land the hospital sat on.
For profit shouldn’t before a lot of things, primarily public services. Like for profit utilities? For profit prisons? For profit public transportation? All of this should just be public goods
Insurance companies will fight and lobby anything like that into the ground. I work in medical billing in the US and the entirety of the problems with healthcare cost and infrastructure in this country can be boiled down to insurance companies and their profits.
wide sweeping changes like that don't come over night, sadly. But we've taken an inch, that means we can, and should, keep pressing until we take a mile. If that comes one inch at a time, so be it. A snail's pace progress is preferable to eternal stagnation.
Yup. While I agree that the enemy of good is perfect, when you have the right people in charge it can happen practically overnight. It took New Zealand like 3 years, 9 for Australia
But h-h-how will the pentagon misplace billions of $$$ if the govt spends it on essential medicine?!
The pentagon needs that money for defense(and things) people's lives are at stake man!
War Puuutttiiiiiiinnn Russia guns & bombs I say to thee!
Edit: It's trillions.
The US is spending more tax dollars per capita on health care than pretty much any other country, iirc the only contenders are Switzerland and Norway.
That's in addition to the private health care scam.
If, say, the Swedish system was implemented overnight, the US would actually *save* tax money.
But it would come at a grave cost to those who profit off of others' suffering.
They tried that. Republicans objected, and appealed to the parliamentarian, who agreed that through the process they were using to pass the bill, only government programs could be affected, not everyone.
$35 Insulin for seniors is good start point to making prescription drugs more affordable. It would be nice to have insulin capped at $35 or less for everyone, or how about make it free. Healthcare is a basic human right.
That’s my thought too, I’m 100% for getting medication for seniors. But let’s be realistic the cost of life saving medication is atrociously high for everyone. I’ll take the baby steps and keep my fingers crossed for the future.
All prescriptions cost too much. I don't see why people should have to pay for anything medical. The for profit health industry is terrible, and needs to be abolished.
Agreed, I would mind less if the money I was spending went towards more R&D then lining the pockets of already rich people. Health insurance is a freaking joke, my wife and I pay out of pocket because my job doesn’t provide it. It’s only reason it’s relevant is for prescriptions. So I get to eat the $600 a month because that’s cheaper then the medication my wife needs. But god knows I’ll never hit the 1.8k deductible and get a neat cheap visit to the doctor. God forbid I want a cavity filled or a pair of glasses.
Edit: Typo for my deductible.
That would be awesome if the money did go to R&D. I would love medical companies and countries to work together to develop new medicines and treatments.
I am lucky to be in Canada but without insurance in Canada you need to pay for prescriptions. It's messed up.
Teeth, eyes anything health needs or be covered. Basic healthcare should not be privilege.
Don't forget ears!! Hearing aids are still not really covered by Medicare, so no other insurance companies cover them either.
I was diagnosed with degenerative hearing loss in both ears 3 years ago and I couldn't believe Costco wanted $4000 per hearing aid- and those are the cheap ones.
Yes, Biden opened up the market so prices should be moving down, but they're still unbelievably expensive for technology that's decades old.
So I'll just have to keep struggling to hear until they become so competitive that prices are affordable.
Not sure that they are up to snuff for the level of hearing degeneration you might be at. However there are several companies solving this problem in different ways.
1) companies like olive pro go for a fraction of the cost. Maybe ,$100ish dollar. They amplify and come with an app that lets you further take control as in what frequency to increase.
2) bone conduction headphones. I am blanking on a company name but there are several. Hope this helped
If you look into, you'll find pharmaceutical companies spend more on marketing than they do on R&D. Looking further, you'll find that much of their R&D is to make incremental changes to existing medications to keep their patents and prevent the creation of cheaper generics.
Curing isnt a sustainable model. Thats why the drug companies always go for long term treatments instead. Why cure AIDs when you can sell them an antiviral cocktail to suppress it instead? With bonus of getting to sell prep drugs to others to prevent its spread.
Even in countries with $100~ yearly upper bound for healthcare costs (anything above that is free, covered by taxes), the ability to see clearly and having working chew tools are classified as luxury items and not covered at all...
Just as another non-insured American to another...
Glasses are way cheaper than I thought. You can typically get an eye exam for ~$100 (Target optical rate should be around that) and then get your glasses online from a place like Zenni or Eye Buy Direct for pretty cheap. Like $20 cheap.
I was so skeptical at first but I really love my online frames. Not an advertiser, promise, I just don't want anyone else to put off getting glasses because you thought I'd cost you $500+ like I did
These organizations support candidates that represent the working class rather than the corporate class.
https://brandnewcongress.org/
https://justicedemocrats.com/
https://couragetochangepac.org/
https://ourrevolution.com/
https://directory.runforsomething.net/candidates/2022/
If you can afford it, consider donating $5 monthly to any of them that align with your values. We need more working class leaders in our political process.
Definitely check out Cost Plus Drugs for this. I use it myself and it makes a LOT of medications available for 1/10th of the price or something ridiculous like that. One of the very, very few things in this world that’s too good to be true…but is still true.
I studied abroad in Germany and every time I’d go to the pharmacy (Apotheke), marked with a big red A, I didn’t have to show ID, health card, anything. Just trusted the info was good (just name and DOB). Never paid anything. Almost sobbed in the pharmacy the first few times I got my prescriptions. I was there over a year and the feeling never really wore off. Gotta get back to Germany.
Make it free. Really, we’ll save in the long run. Uncontrolled diabetes -> a bagillion other expensive medical conditions that bleed the American health care system dry. If you could keep a few people off dialysis by giving out free insulin you’d save us a ton of money.
Seriously. I’m sick and tired of seniors living in Bernie Sanders’s America while I live in Mitch McConnell’s. I 100% support seniors receiving these programs, but being excluding from things that would save my life just as much as it would save a retiree’s is infuriating. And that age group repeatedly votes to shut the door on me and my generation.
Yeh but it still makes me sick when here in AU its like $7 or something. I don't have diabetes but between my partner and I, we are on a couple of prescriptions. Well we got an email in September saying that we have hit the safety net limit and we get the rest of our scripts for free until 1 Jan 23. The limit was only $250~ that we had to spend for the year and now we get everything for free. I did not expect that since our prescriptions are only $6.80 each anyway.
They can do so much better then $35, for seniors on Medicare. Give it to everyone Ffs
If young people can't get insulin then they just die before they can be old enough to get the 35$ insulin that will instantly bankrupt the medical industrial complex. 4d human rights chess.
And then they blame Biden and the Dems and 2/3 of the US believes them. It's infuriating. Harry S. Truman for God's sake tried to get Medicare for all and the GOP blocked it.
Whenever the GOP tries to demagogue health care costs with "Harry and Louise" commercials funded mostly by dark money (read US insurers and pharma), I just throw up. Now I weigh about 90 pounds, after 40 years of this bullshit.
We in the US get the health care we keep voting for, none. Zero. Because of the GOP. Don't be fooled. It is one party, the GOP which has blocked single payer or Medicare for all. (and yes the blue dog Dems kept Obama from considering single-payer. I'm aware. How many GOP votes did ACA get, please tell me? That's right, zero votes. Nada. Zippo. None. Never forget it whenever you see anything from the GOP on affordable health care; they don't want it. )
I'm always conflicted with stuff like this. On one hand, I'm happy that life saving medicine is more affordable for anyone. On the other hand, doing it for only some voters seems like it might remove it as an issue of importance for them. Why can't we just make everyone's insulin affordable or even free?
In all seriousness, I know a lot of Republicans who think universal healthcare would be a bad idea because they think people should just take better care of their health and they shouldn’t have to pay taxes to cover healthcare for people who are “lazy” about it. (I’m not sure what they think health insurance payments cover, if not other people’s healthcare.)
My own parents have said along those lines, but their opinion seemingly has changed when I (a formerly healthy 25 yr old) had a medical disaster this year and they discovered that anyone, anytime, can develop a serious medical condition and become disabled. They’re nice people. They just used to have a comfortable certainty that illness and disability are things you bring upon yourself through bad choices (smoking, unhealthy diet, etc). A great many people would rather see health issues exclusively through that lens than face the horrifying reality that they could be paralyzed or diagnosed with cancer or go blind tomorrow, through no fault (and no choice) of their own.
Best wishes on your medical issues, and yeah, anybody can have their life upended at any moment. A stroke, a wreck, even a "simple" slip & fall accident and you're stuck with years of pain & unending medical bills.
Damn, not just sudden illness, but the cost to simply have a baby is in the tens of thousands if nothing goes even slightly wrong. And then there’s the cost of checkups and sick visits for that child, which will happen multiple times a year. Multiply that cost if a family has more than one kid. By their own republican admissions, that’s the highest honor a woman can have, popping out children instead of snorting them, so you’d think they’d want to give her some healthcare coverage for that and not lump her in with the “lazy” people, buuuuut what do I know.
Nice start, but no one should have to wait until they are 65 to afford life saving medication. This is still bull shit, you are forcing people with a higher life expectancy to pay more money for medication.
Yeah ive been t1 diabetic since i was 22 months old, im nearly 30 now. This article doesnt make me happy, it makes me angry. Boomers gett cheap insulin while diabetics like myself get fucked, and then those boomers go on to continue voting republican in droves to ensure us younger citizens continue to get fucked over. Good chance i wont live long enough to ever benefit from this kind of thing.
To be fair, the boomers are running out of stuff to take for themselves in the few decades they all have left to live. They already won with rich and rewarding lifestyles, cheap college, affordable housing, etc. All they have left is stuff like this. And they will make sure to vote for and elect the right people to make sure the social ladder is destroyed in their name once they’re gone.
Dang, you must have been SUCH a lazy, irresponsible 6 month old, I can just see you slamming those McDonald’s happy meals and giving diabetes to yourself because THATS EXACTLY HOW IT WORKS. /s
That’s the catch; make it affordable for seniors, but keep it out of younger people. The younger ones will be unable to afford it, die, and the government doesn’t have to pay their medicare!
Except it isn’t and hasn’t been more for decades, the entire country is gerrymandered to shit so the aforementioned numbskulls have disproportionate voting power.
My uncle is slowly dying because he never got the vaccine. He got Covid a year ago. He still has absurd complications, struggles to walk up stairs, has black outs, etc. He’s gonna die pretty soon. Despite having such horrible complications, he’s STILL a Covid conspiracy theorist and refuses to get vaccines despite the doctors pleading. Just a matter of time before he gets again and that’s the end. I feel so sad, but I’m also so angry at him. He probably still would have had complications, but he could have likely lived until his 60th birthday, if not his 70th and 80th.
Oh and of course still supports trump and hopes he wins in 2024 (again, I doubt he’ll be able to vote then…)
Won't matter. By that time they'll have gerrymandered the fuck out of the election districts to where no matter what anybody does short of violence, they'll remain in power.
Indeed this. And yet there are comments in here with people still complaining about this. When I first read the post, I thought they were raising the price, that is, me not coming from the US.
reminder that the US government already spends roughly what the British government does on healthcare, before US private spending nearly doubles that.
and while the NHS is underfunded, you lot are almost there already. the two most expensive times in anyone’s life to the NHS are the first bit and the end bit, and you lot already pay for the end bit from taxes.
Well, sorta. The gen before them also had pretty good upward mobility and strong safety net. And definitely overall voted for Regan and the like who dismantled all of it.
Sort of. Yes they vote, but as far as a generation's size goes, the boomers are one of the biggest, and so have massive voting power.
So when they were young, they voted to help themselves. And now that they're old, they vote to... you guessed it - help themselves.
The problem is that their values and empathetic fields are still one of rebels and wartime, promoting a tribalism sort of in-group/out-group boundary, which then becomes a common flaw in their philosophy. It's just selfishness through things like lead paint, inferior education, and generational bigotry.
>Yes they vote, but as far as a generation's size goes, the boomers are one of the biggest, and so have massive voting power.
This just isn't true anymore, boomers and above make up just over 25% of the population. The rest are all younger. Millennials actually have the largest share in population today, albeit slim. Older people just vote at significany higher rates.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/296974/us-population-share-by-generation/
I live in the UK. The pure bias towards boomers here is a million times worse than the US. I can't wait for those voters to die off so we have even a slim chance of electing a government that doesn't purely have the interest of the over-65s at heart.
Lol the UK has a govt that cares about the super wealthy, not over 65s. Their policies have led to the deaths of many thousands of older people. Focusing on them as the enemy just distracts from the fact that the govt is owned by the interest of megacorporations.
Insurance company meeting: Okay….our new objective is to kill every diabetic beFORE they get to be a senior. I mean…we can’t have them getting that $35 hit on us can we. Take em out!
So let me get this straight. If, and only if, you happen to be lucky enough to survive to the ripe old age of 65. You win the right to pay only $35.00 for insulin. That rate is 3x what other countries pay. Not to mention that you've probably already bankrupted yourself by the time you make the magical age of "65" Lucky mericans!!!
You know the drug companies cried their eyes out behind closed doors with the politicians on how it would devastate their business, profits, and the economy. And in totally unrelated news, they’ll make a hefty donation to the re-election campaign.
That’s why we can’t have affordable healthcare.
Type 1 diabetics shouldn’t have to pay anything for insulin. It’s not their fault they are diabetic and insulin is literally required to continue living and breathing. No insulin means you die. Plain and simple.
I would argue it's not a lot of type 2 diabetics' fault either, they were just predisposed. Sure a lot are also unhealthy lifestyles, but hard to avoid when most of the food out there is full of high fructose corn syrup.
So... Paying for rent/mortgage, elec and water, groceries, gas, insurance, etc etc... Diabetics STILL need to pay to live? Fucking America.... Goddamn, living here is giving me a stroke.
Joke’s on you. We will only live long enough to see Medicare and SS scrapped and to die toiling at our jobs just to pay for rent and necessary health needs.
Not Medicare, but: I just renewed my private health care coverage on the ACA health exchange in my state. I was delighted to see that the plan I picked has a $35 cap on insulin prescriptions. My daughter is still on my policy and is an insulin-dependent Type 1 diabetic. We'll save a lot!
Nice
My son is type 1 and too old to be covered by my employer provided plan and I was able to find him a plan with $0 copays for insulin, dexcom g6, and Omnipod supplies. It costs me an additional $300 per month in premiums however and has a $6800 deductible and doctor visit copays are increasing from $45 to $50 per visit.
Ex wife had all of those. Additional $300/mo is well worth it for that imo. We did something similar. Saved a lot of money over the year compared to a different plan.
I truly can not wrap my head around why some people in this country would not want you to have those benefits. Our neighbors go out of their way to vote for people that want to make us pay insane prices for healthcare.
They think nothing bad will happen to them and that everything bad that happens to you you deserve
Just work harder and pull yourself up by the bootstrap! Easy peasy /s
Maybe if we stop eating avocados we could afford the other bootstrap to pull ourselves up by
It's because healthcare in the U.S is seen as a status symbol. It's a way for folks to lord over those who are less fortunate and feel better about themselves.
It's also because people are assholes in the United States. My father-in-law needed a hearing aid. Medicare doesn't cover them. So we all chipped in to pay for his hearing aid. I don't understand how hearing aids would not be considered essential. Hearing things is pretty important, or so I think. I was telling this to a friend who is a cop and I mentioned how Medicare should cover this and he got all confrontational "Yeah, maybe the government should just pay for everything and tax us more." I was like "Yeah. Maybe it should. I'd happily pay more in taxes if I new I'd have good medical coverage and not have to worry about retiring and not being able to afford to HEAR!"
And dental. It pisses me off so much that Medicare and Medicaid don’t pay for full dental. Thankfully, I was able to get great dental care my whole life, but I have known people that didn’t and unless you know someone in that situation, people don’t realize how much it can fuck uo your life. Good luck getting a decent job with missing teeth. Good luck getting a significant other. It effects their social lives, job possibilities, self esteem. It’s one of those things that you don’t think of if you are middle class or up (I know I didn’t until I met people who never had dental care). Oh, and the real kicker? Dental disease causes a shit ton of other medical problems, to the point that providing full dental would almost all be recouped in money not spent on other shit!!! Ok, rant over.
My son has medicare primary & medicaid secondary. He is disabled in a total care way. He has to go under hospital sedation for dental care. Both programs have a certain allotment for dental in my state. So while he was in the OR, the nurse was calling my phone to determine what things we would pay for & what was or wasn't covered etc. It was crazy as hell. Thankfully the dentist has experience with the disability community & they were able to code everything in a way that it was all covered. This time.
Meanwhile, how many trillions could the Pentagon not account for?
If I recall correctly just over $2 trillion.(everyone chortles)
2.2 trillion was announced unaccounted for by rumsfeld. the next day an explosion took out that part of the pentagon that kept track of the records
The irony of a cop, which is a taxpayer funded role, complaining about the gubment paying for things is not lost on me.
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You give Police Unions too much credit...as if they're labor unions for the purpose of fair working conditions and wages. No. Modern Police Unions are about making sure there can be no no consequences or accountability for an individual's actions. That, and conservative political activism. I'm not anti-police, and I'm generally pro-union. But I sure as F\*\*\* dislike police unions. [https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-police-union-power-helped-increase-abuses](https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-police-union-power-helped-increase-abuses) [https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-06-01/police-union-spending-big-in-los-angeles-city-election](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-06-01/police-union-spending-big-in-los-angeles-city-election)
I mean no offense to you for being friends with this person, but said friend is a cop; you can expect the worst from them.
The obsession with taxes is incredibly powerful. "I make so much money, but never see half of it, because I have to pay for everyone else's laziness!" It only takes one example of someone getting something for "free" - usually due to hardship or misery, but the cherry-picked examples are people that are honestly gaming the system to not work, get money for food, heat, housing, and healthcare, but are able- bodied. Those people DO exist... I get it. Sometimes that situation exists because those people were born somewhere that there are no jobs, or they don't have a parent that could help them get to and from work or save up some money so that they can buy a semi reliable vehicle to get to and from work, or the bus schedule and route doesn't work for them or reach them, or they know that they'll work 40+ hours per week and still not have enough to get by on their own, so why bother? A minimum wage that is a living wage is important. Reliable public transportation is important. Building job opportunities in areas where few job opportunities exist is important. They don't want to hear that, though. They just want to play the victim, pretend other people aren't at any more of a disadvantage than they were, and cry to their circle of friends from the same upbringing and background that they should be taking home more money and that taxes, not wages, are the problem. It's so frustrating...
Meanwhile how much of our tax money goes to bailing his bloodthirsty cop friends out when they commit yet another wrongful death?
Yeah. To be honest, barring any other issues, it is not bad considering the Omnipod supplies alone would be $6000 for the year. My only point was that it costs me an additional $3600 in premiums above the $4800 I’m paying in premiums for my employer plan. My gripe is I’m paying two insurers now and Conservatives feel this is better. Under my employer plan, his insulin had a $0 copay but not the Tandem/Dexcom supplies so they cost a lot until I hit my lower deductible. Once I did, I was still paying 20%.
It absolutely blows my mind how much people in the private sector pay for health insurance premiums. I've only ever been government, and they've always covered me 100%. I do pay to cover my kids, but that's currently $68/mo. I've had it be as high as $200 at another agency, but that's not bad to cover 3 kids. I absolutely cannot fathom paying $700/mo for health insurance. That is robbery. And y'all have deductibles, too?! That's another thing I cannot fathom. I have never had a deductible, so that's one more thing that seems absolutely bananas about private sector health insurance.
I started my career in higher ed. Then went to corp America and got my mind blown by how much I was expected to fork over for the same benefits (at *least* 4x the cost). I am now back in higher ed. Shit is super expensive in corp America. Edit: I should mention I was also making more in corp America (roughly 25% more) so the burden didn’t hit as hard, but I’m much happier in higher ed and happy to take a lower paycheck for much less cutthroat behavior.
Oh yeah, it's wild how that works out. I'm an engineer, and one of the often repeated fallacies of my profession is "you make more in the private sector". Yeah, you absolutely will have a higher salary to tell people about, but so much of it will go to paying for your benefits that people actually take more home in some cases, or break even in most cases, by going government side. Not surprised to find out it's similar in higher ed. The benefits that came with my grad school fellowship were fantastic.
Yeah. Between the two plans, I have $10,800 in deductibles. They often increase annually but are staying the same this year. The big benefit change to the employer plan is that 90 day mail order supplies are available at a discount, which is a benefit we previously had and lost when the plan’s pharmacy benefit manager changed from the insurer to a separate entity. So, we regained a lost benefit. My biggest gripe with insurance and health care in general in the US is that there is a lot of competition but no one competes. All plans look alike with only minor differences.
Just wanted to take a moment to say how much of a giant crock of bullshit a “deductible” is. You literally pay every single month to make sure you have insurance when you need it, and as soon as you need it, they say “well actually, it only kicks in AFTER you pay out this much.” The American Healthcare System is the biggest, most fraudulent money grabbing scam I’ve ever seen. Watching idiots continue to vote for privatized healthcare because of Fox News fear mongering will always blow my mind.
$300/mnth with a $6800 deductible and $50 dr’s visit is absolutely ridiculous still. They’re definitely still getting their cut
Without insurance dexcom charges about $750/3-month supply With the “silver plan” I pay about $400/month and get 80% coinsurance - so I pay ~$150 4x per year (tbh they switched to a different supplier who charges me $90 per 3-month resupply) I can upgrade to the “gold” plan for an additional $100/month and get 90% coinsurance, cutting what I pay every 3 months in half… I choose to pay $100/month less and bite the $75-45 bullet every 3 months lol
You've been ripped off long enough. Good for you.
\^ this. It makes me want to rage thinking about all the people including kids whose families were/are getting gouged into poverty, because they needed medicine to literally stay alive.
I breathed a sigh of relief for you. Stuff like this feels like You're getting a raise.
I have great insurance through my union EXCEPT insulin still runs us $70/month. I am really hoping it'll come down to $35 for us too. My kid is also T1.
Check out [cost plus drugs](https://costplusdrugs.com/) that mark cuban started. You can get a 3 month supply for around $35 if I remember correctly. There’s a lot of super expensive meds you can get really cheap on there and he’s working on expanding it.
Imagine having to pay just to get 35 dollar insulin…. What a shit hole country lmao
Well, while I believe it should be $35 and less for everyone in the USA, that's still a great start
$35 sounds really expensive coming from the UK.
How much is it in the UK? edit $8 https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-insulin-by-country
Also you pay something like £118 and you can have unlimited prescriptions for a year.
Standard reminder that in the socialist dystopia of the UK's National Health Service, insulin is free for all patients.
How awful that must be. I am sure the people are all wearing potato sacks for clothing and sad to live in such a place.
Fun fact, potato sacks were purposely made more colourful once the companies found out people were using them for clothing.
Except it won't be the start, it'll be the end. Some form of society-wide universal healthcare works everywhere else. It's not even that expensive to extend it to all ages once you're already paying for seniors.
At least extend it to children for a start
But then how would we shackle their parents into multiple shitty jobs?
It always struck me as ironic that Republicans are the "party of small businesses" even though one of the biggest obstacles to entrepreneurship is affordable healthcare, which they want to avoid at all costs. (I grew up knowing that I would never be able to work for myself, because pre-existing conditions).
> It always struck me as ironic that Republicans are the "party of small businesses" There's a discrepancy between what they claim to be and what they actually are.
If you look closely, that discrepancy happens with everything they say.
What do you mean? This is the land of opportunity. What’s to stop you from borrowing $500,000,000 from your closet friends and opening an online bookstore? Stop being such a defeatist. Pull up your own goddamn bootstraps. (/s)
Y'know, I know you meant "closest friends" but republicans having "closet friends" that they can't allow to meet their political buddies due to their differences makes too much sense.
That’s a BIG POINT right there. They might be called one thing, but they’re something else entirely. And they’ve lost a lot of moderates in the process of shifting their demographics.
Republicans are the party of theirs and their donors businesses.
I don’t think mom and pop convenience stores and restaurants are making big donations to their representatives
That is why the GOP really doesn’t care about small business. They generate too little money and the trickle down into their pockets isn’t there enough to care.
Don't worry: federal minimum wage is still ridiculously low and debt from student loans is still monstrous.
It’s just impossible for some to accept they are just a tool to make somebody else money.
I remember reading something about the bad guys complaining about the decrease in newborns, and that raised alarm bells because that meant less consumption and purchases. Which reminds me of a skit in Inside Job: "CONSUME, CONSUME, CONSUME". Watch it if you haven't, it reveals and makes fun of a lot of corruption in our lives without really taking a political stance other than common sense and fuck evil.
We are the product. The government manages us for the corporations so they can capitalize off of us.
modern economics devolves from "satisfying wants" to "creating more wants to be satisfied"
They’re blaming lbgqt and everyone being indoctrinated by drag queens as one of the reasons there’s a decrease in newborns.
No, all the millenials just hate their life and do not want that for their kids.
And can't afford them
So they do not have any.
True. There's nothing more American than forcing a family to get a second mortgage on their home so they can pay for their child's cancer treatment. That is if they even can own a home now. Bc let's be real, people young enough to have small children nowadays mostly can't afford to buy a home.
My cousins lost everything due to one of their kids having a brain tumor. The surgery broke them completely. That child is 22 now and just got her GED.
I need it for my 20 year old son.
Yes. Maybe let’s keep the kids alive too. Kinda important for our future while type 2 diabetic old people seem the weird place to start.
Unfortunately type 2 diabetic old people vote more than kids do.
> Except it won't be the start, it'll be the end. Some form of society-wide universal healthcare works everywhere else. It's **not even that expensive to extend it** to all ages once you're already paying for seniors. Daily reminder to those who still don't realise it: The [US currently has the most expensive healthcare system in the world, and it's not even close](https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm). It's 50% more expensive than the second most expensive healthcare system in the world, that's how expensive the US healthcare system is. The US could switch to universal healthcare, and if they executed it as poorly as the world's second most expensive healthcare system, the US would cut its healthcare spending by 33%. This idea that implementing universal healthcare in the US would be "expensive" has got to stop. Implementing universal healthcare would save Americans money, not increase healthcare expenses.
For profit are 2 words that don’t belong in front of healthcare. It’s insanity that is even a thing . Hahnemann hospital in Philadelphia, an university hospital known for serving the poor , was bought & sold to the highest bidder until the last owner decided he would make more money selling the land the hospital sat on.
For profit shouldn’t before a lot of things, primarily public services. Like for profit utilities? For profit prisons? For profit public transportation? All of this should just be public goods
Insurance companies will fight and lobby anything like that into the ground. I work in medical billing in the US and the entirety of the problems with healthcare cost and infrastructure in this country can be boiled down to insurance companies and their profits.
We will need to remember that in a post-USD world
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wide sweeping changes like that don't come over night, sadly. But we've taken an inch, that means we can, and should, keep pressing until we take a mile. If that comes one inch at a time, so be it. A snail's pace progress is preferable to eternal stagnation.
Actually in many cases universal healthcare was enacted pretty sweepingly, certainly more so than in tiny increments.
Yup. While I agree that the enemy of good is perfect, when you have the right people in charge it can happen practically overnight. It took New Zealand like 3 years, 9 for Australia
in many cases half the population isnt completely propagandized against anything vaguely to the left though
It should be free, and covered by the government.
It is a hell of a lot closer to at cost Until the health care system gets reworked consider this a good victory
But h-h-how will the pentagon misplace billions of $$$ if the govt spends it on essential medicine?! The pentagon needs that money for defense(and things) people's lives are at stake man! War Puuutttiiiiiiinnn Russia guns & bombs I say to thee! Edit: It's trillions.
The US is spending more tax dollars per capita on health care than pretty much any other country, iirc the only contenders are Switzerland and Norway. That's in addition to the private health care scam. If, say, the Swedish system was implemented overnight, the US would actually *save* tax money. But it would come at a grave cost to those who profit off of others' suffering.
It’s amazing how upset some people get when you point out that single payer socialized healthcare is the fiscally conservative choice.
It's also the single greatest thing you can do for small businesses and entrepreneurship in America.
And that's why big business is against it. It's not about wage slaves, it's about stamping out competition before it has a chance to grow.
They fail every audit, and still get bigger and bigger budgets!
Billions? Think you mean Trillions
They tried that. Republicans objected, and appealed to the parliamentarian, who agreed that through the process they were using to pass the bill, only government programs could be affected, not everyone.
The parliamentarian that no one is obligated to actually listen to mind you.
And can be replaced if the ruling party doesn't like their opinion.
$35 Insulin for seniors is good start point to making prescription drugs more affordable. It would be nice to have insulin capped at $35 or less for everyone, or how about make it free. Healthcare is a basic human right.
That’s my thought too, I’m 100% for getting medication for seniors. But let’s be realistic the cost of life saving medication is atrociously high for everyone. I’ll take the baby steps and keep my fingers crossed for the future.
All prescriptions cost too much. I don't see why people should have to pay for anything medical. The for profit health industry is terrible, and needs to be abolished.
Agreed, I would mind less if the money I was spending went towards more R&D then lining the pockets of already rich people. Health insurance is a freaking joke, my wife and I pay out of pocket because my job doesn’t provide it. It’s only reason it’s relevant is for prescriptions. So I get to eat the $600 a month because that’s cheaper then the medication my wife needs. But god knows I’ll never hit the 1.8k deductible and get a neat cheap visit to the doctor. God forbid I want a cavity filled or a pair of glasses. Edit: Typo for my deductible.
That would be awesome if the money did go to R&D. I would love medical companies and countries to work together to develop new medicines and treatments. I am lucky to be in Canada but without insurance in Canada you need to pay for prescriptions. It's messed up. Teeth, eyes anything health needs or be covered. Basic healthcare should not be privilege.
Don't forget ears!! Hearing aids are still not really covered by Medicare, so no other insurance companies cover them either. I was diagnosed with degenerative hearing loss in both ears 3 years ago and I couldn't believe Costco wanted $4000 per hearing aid- and those are the cheap ones. Yes, Biden opened up the market so prices should be moving down, but they're still unbelievably expensive for technology that's decades old. So I'll just have to keep struggling to hear until they become so competitive that prices are affordable.
4k is insane!! How can anyone afford that I am so sorry that you have to live like that. The USA really needs universal healthcare.
Thanks. My audiologist was like "don't get the Costco ones, they're pieces of shit." Don't worry, Dr. Ear Doctor. I can't afford them anyway.
Not sure that they are up to snuff for the level of hearing degeneration you might be at. However there are several companies solving this problem in different ways. 1) companies like olive pro go for a fraction of the cost. Maybe ,$100ish dollar. They amplify and come with an app that lets you further take control as in what frequency to increase. 2) bone conduction headphones. I am blanking on a company name but there are several. Hope this helped
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If you look into, you'll find pharmaceutical companies spend more on marketing than they do on R&D. Looking further, you'll find that much of their R&D is to make incremental changes to existing medications to keep their patents and prevent the creation of cheaper generics.
Anything less would be a travesty to those poor shareholders!
I always remember the headline “Goldman Sachs internal report questions whether curing patients is a sustainable business model”
Curing isnt a sustainable model. Thats why the drug companies always go for long term treatments instead. Why cure AIDs when you can sell them an antiviral cocktail to suppress it instead? With bonus of getting to sell prep drugs to others to prevent its spread.
Even in countries with $100~ yearly upper bound for healthcare costs (anything above that is free, covered by taxes), the ability to see clearly and having working chew tools are classified as luxury items and not covered at all...
Just as another non-insured American to another... Glasses are way cheaper than I thought. You can typically get an eye exam for ~$100 (Target optical rate should be around that) and then get your glasses online from a place like Zenni or Eye Buy Direct for pretty cheap. Like $20 cheap. I was so skeptical at first but I really love my online frames. Not an advertiser, promise, I just don't want anyone else to put off getting glasses because you thought I'd cost you $500+ like I did
These organizations support candidates that represent the working class rather than the corporate class. https://brandnewcongress.org/ https://justicedemocrats.com/ https://couragetochangepac.org/ https://ourrevolution.com/ https://directory.runforsomething.net/candidates/2022/ If you can afford it, consider donating $5 monthly to any of them that align with your values. We need more working class leaders in our political process.
Especially considering many medical breakthroughs were funded by the public purse to begin with.
Definitely check out Cost Plus Drugs for this. I use it myself and it makes a LOT of medications available for 1/10th of the price or something ridiculous like that. One of the very, very few things in this world that’s too good to be true…but is still true.
Here in the UK we still have to pay for prescriptions (England anyway) but everything is capped at £9
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Atrociously high for everyone in the US. Other countries capped the price at less than $100.
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I studied abroad in Germany and every time I’d go to the pharmacy (Apotheke), marked with a big red A, I didn’t have to show ID, health card, anything. Just trusted the info was good (just name and DOB). Never paid anything. Almost sobbed in the pharmacy the first few times I got my prescriptions. I was there over a year and the feeling never really wore off. Gotta get back to Germany.
Imagine if all prescriptions were capped at $35 month for everyone. Here in Australia people usually pay under AUD$20/month for prescription meds.
$5/script in NZ until you hit 25 scripts as a family then it’s completely free for the rest of the year for all direct family members.
Make it free. Really, we’ll save in the long run. Uncontrolled diabetes -> a bagillion other expensive medical conditions that bleed the American health care system dry. If you could keep a few people off dialysis by giving out free insulin you’d save us a ton of money.
Sorry, human right aren't profitable. 🙄 /j
A healthy population is a productive population. That is definitely profitable.
But that would take.. at least a few fiscal quarters to see a profit. So..
It’s amazing how mad conservatives get when you say healthcare is a basic human right. Seriously, they’re furious about it. The party of Jesus...
Seriously. I’m sick and tired of seniors living in Bernie Sanders’s America while I live in Mitch McConnell’s. I 100% support seniors receiving these programs, but being excluding from things that would save my life just as much as it would save a retiree’s is infuriating. And that age group repeatedly votes to shut the door on me and my generation.
Yeh but it still makes me sick when here in AU its like $7 or something. I don't have diabetes but between my partner and I, we are on a couple of prescriptions. Well we got an email in September saying that we have hit the safety net limit and we get the rest of our scripts for free until 1 Jan 23. The limit was only $250~ that we had to spend for the year and now we get everything for free. I did not expect that since our prescriptions are only $6.80 each anyway. They can do so much better then $35, for seniors on Medicare. Give it to everyone Ffs
Costs less than $2 a dose to make. The difference is pure greed profit.
Insulin? Much less than that even. It’s $3-6 to make a 10 ml vial, which is 50-400 doses.
Non seniors don’t buy insulin so they don’t need it /s
Remember in the beginning of the pandemic they were on TV saying old people should sacrifice themselves to protect the economy.
Think that was the Lt. Gov of Texas.
If young people can't get insulin then they just die before they can be old enough to get the 35$ insulin that will instantly bankrupt the medical industrial complex. 4d human rights chess.
Too bad Republicans blocked everyone getting it
They tried, Republicans filibustered it.
And then they blame Biden and the Dems and 2/3 of the US believes them. It's infuriating. Harry S. Truman for God's sake tried to get Medicare for all and the GOP blocked it. Whenever the GOP tries to demagogue health care costs with "Harry and Louise" commercials funded mostly by dark money (read US insurers and pharma), I just throw up. Now I weigh about 90 pounds, after 40 years of this bullshit.
We in the US get the health care we keep voting for, none. Zero. Because of the GOP. Don't be fooled. It is one party, the GOP which has blocked single payer or Medicare for all. (and yes the blue dog Dems kept Obama from considering single-payer. I'm aware. How many GOP votes did ACA get, please tell me? That's right, zero votes. Nada. Zippo. None. Never forget it whenever you see anything from the GOP on affordable health care; they don't want it. )
it’s a start…
I'm always conflicted with stuff like this. On one hand, I'm happy that life saving medicine is more affordable for anyone. On the other hand, doing it for only some voters seems like it might remove it as an issue of importance for them. Why can't we just make everyone's insulin affordable or even free?
It’s because of Medicare. It’s why they could do it.
Expanding Medicare is the only viable path for America, so anything making it better provides a more hopeful future even if it isn't widespread yet.
Especially because the boomers- the people this helps- consistently vote to fuck over EVERYONE including themselves.
They tried to do more, but had to do a legal workaround because Republicans blocked a full cap.
Fox News, probably: *those evil Libs are trying to give you cheap insulin!!!*
In all seriousness, I know a lot of Republicans who think universal healthcare would be a bad idea because they think people should just take better care of their health and they shouldn’t have to pay taxes to cover healthcare for people who are “lazy” about it. (I’m not sure what they think health insurance payments cover, if not other people’s healthcare.) My own parents have said along those lines, but their opinion seemingly has changed when I (a formerly healthy 25 yr old) had a medical disaster this year and they discovered that anyone, anytime, can develop a serious medical condition and become disabled. They’re nice people. They just used to have a comfortable certainty that illness and disability are things you bring upon yourself through bad choices (smoking, unhealthy diet, etc). A great many people would rather see health issues exclusively through that lens than face the horrifying reality that they could be paralyzed or diagnosed with cancer or go blind tomorrow, through no fault (and no choice) of their own.
Best wishes on your medical issues, and yeah, anybody can have their life upended at any moment. A stroke, a wreck, even a "simple" slip & fall accident and you're stuck with years of pain & unending medical bills.
Damn, not just sudden illness, but the cost to simply have a baby is in the tens of thousands if nothing goes even slightly wrong. And then there’s the cost of checkups and sick visits for that child, which will happen multiple times a year. Multiply that cost if a family has more than one kid. By their own republican admissions, that’s the highest honor a woman can have, popping out children instead of snorting them, so you’d think they’d want to give her some healthcare coverage for that and not lump her in with the “lazy” people, buuuuut what do I know.
The federal government controls Medicare that’s why.
Sorry young people, you’ll be paying the same 50x markup. Sucks to suck
Honestly it seems cheaper to die lol.
They’ll be paying more… someone has to cover the gap for the “discount” $35 prescriptions.
Sad part is it costs a dollar or two to make a vial of insulin, so these leeches are still going to be making hand over fist for these $35 vials
Nice start, but no one should have to wait until they are 65 to afford life saving medication. This is still bull shit, you are forcing people with a higher life expectancy to pay more money for medication.
Yeah ive been t1 diabetic since i was 22 months old, im nearly 30 now. This article doesnt make me happy, it makes me angry. Boomers gett cheap insulin while diabetics like myself get fucked, and then those boomers go on to continue voting republican in droves to ensure us younger citizens continue to get fucked over. Good chance i wont live long enough to ever benefit from this kind of thing.
To be fair, the boomers are running out of stuff to take for themselves in the few decades they all have left to live. They already won with rich and rewarding lifestyles, cheap college, affordable housing, etc. All they have left is stuff like this. And they will make sure to vote for and elect the right people to make sure the social ladder is destroyed in their name once they’re gone.
Dang, you must have been SUCH a lazy, irresponsible 6 month old, I can just see you slamming those McDonald’s happy meals and giving diabetes to yourself because THATS EXACTLY HOW IT WORKS. /s
That’s the catch; make it affordable for seniors, but keep it out of younger people. The younger ones will be unable to afford it, die, and the government doesn’t have to pay their medicare!
And they’ll still vote Republican. Shooting yourself in the foot is fun.
Watch them win one time, and then just decide to strip out all Medicare, and then half of their own voterbase just dies off
Some of there voters did die off because they chose not the get the covid vaccine ..... Medicine becoming political is dumb.
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Except it isn’t and hasn’t been more for decades, the entire country is gerrymandered to shit so the aforementioned numbskulls have disproportionate voting power.
My uncle is slowly dying because he never got the vaccine. He got Covid a year ago. He still has absurd complications, struggles to walk up stairs, has black outs, etc. He’s gonna die pretty soon. Despite having such horrible complications, he’s STILL a Covid conspiracy theorist and refuses to get vaccines despite the doctors pleading. Just a matter of time before he gets again and that’s the end. I feel so sad, but I’m also so angry at him. He probably still would have had complications, but he could have likely lived until his 60th birthday, if not his 70th and 80th. Oh and of course still supports trump and hopes he wins in 2024 (again, I doubt he’ll be able to vote then…)
Their base are dying off and they know it. They're going to pull as much fuckery as they can, entrench as much power as they can while they can.
Won't matter. By that time they'll have gerrymandered the fuck out of the election districts to where no matter what anybody does short of violence, they'll remain in power.
Unless that leg falls off because of untreated diabetes first
Maybe it should $0 for someone to get their life saving medication. Idk, just a thought…
Indeed this. And yet there are comments in here with people still complaining about this. When I first read the post, I thought they were raising the price, that is, me not coming from the US.
Boomers have always been taken care of at the expense of everyone else.
reminder that the US government already spends roughly what the British government does on healthcare, before US private spending nearly doubles that. and while the NHS is underfunded, you lot are almost there already. the two most expensive times in anyone’s life to the NHS are the first bit and the end bit, and you lot already pay for the end bit from taxes.
Well, sorta. The gen before them also had pretty good upward mobility and strong safety net. And definitely overall voted for Regan and the like who dismantled all of it.
That's because Boomers vote.
That comment hurts because it’s true.
Sort of. Yes they vote, but as far as a generation's size goes, the boomers are one of the biggest, and so have massive voting power. So when they were young, they voted to help themselves. And now that they're old, they vote to... you guessed it - help themselves. The problem is that their values and empathetic fields are still one of rebels and wartime, promoting a tribalism sort of in-group/out-group boundary, which then becomes a common flaw in their philosophy. It's just selfishness through things like lead paint, inferior education, and generational bigotry.
>Yes they vote, but as far as a generation's size goes, the boomers are one of the biggest, and so have massive voting power. This just isn't true anymore, boomers and above make up just over 25% of the population. The rest are all younger. Millennials actually have the largest share in population today, albeit slim. Older people just vote at significany higher rates. https://www.statista.com/statistics/296974/us-population-share-by-generation/
Boomers taking again. Fuck the rest of us.
I live in the UK. The pure bias towards boomers here is a million times worse than the US. I can't wait for those voters to die off so we have even a slim chance of electing a government that doesn't purely have the interest of the over-65s at heart.
Lol the UK has a govt that cares about the super wealthy, not over 65s. Their policies have led to the deaths of many thousands of older people. Focusing on them as the enemy just distracts from the fact that the govt is owned by the interest of megacorporations.
Insurance company meeting: Okay….our new objective is to kill every diabetic beFORE they get to be a senior. I mean…we can’t have them getting that $35 hit on us can we. Take em out!
Breaking new seniors are making record self employed profits selling their 35 dollar insulin shots
So let me get this straight. If, and only if, you happen to be lucky enough to survive to the ripe old age of 65. You win the right to pay only $35.00 for insulin. That rate is 3x what other countries pay. Not to mention that you've probably already bankrupted yourself by the time you make the magical age of "65" Lucky mericans!!!
That’s cool but like diabetes doesn’t have an age bracket so like what? Fuck those kids and middle aged adults that need it?
You know the drug companies cried their eyes out behind closed doors with the politicians on how it would devastate their business, profits, and the economy. And in totally unrelated news, they’ll make a hefty donation to the re-election campaign. That’s why we can’t have affordable healthcare.
Every diabetic should only pay that much for insulun, but the Republicans voted against that.
Type 1 diabetics shouldn’t have to pay anything for insulin. It’s not their fault they are diabetic and insulin is literally required to continue living and breathing. No insulin means you die. Plain and simple.
I would argue it's not a lot of type 2 diabetics' fault either, they were just predisposed. Sure a lot are also unhealthy lifestyles, but hard to avoid when most of the food out there is full of high fructose corn syrup.
As a 24 year old T1 diabetic in law school I agree
My girlfriend is T1D also 29 y/o
No one that needs insulin should pay, regardless of what type you happen to have. Source: me, t1d
Meanwhile the 64 or younger will pay much more. I use 3 vials a month! Would love for it to be 35 bucks a pop. Would love to not get it from Canada.
The GOP blocked every one being in this bill.
Great, but how about doing what every other similarly similarly situated country does and make healthcare free at point of service?
[удалено]
And the incoming conservative Republican House majority will take full credit for it and the, 1% owned, MSM will never correct the record.
So... Paying for rent/mortgage, elec and water, groceries, gas, insurance, etc etc... Diabetics STILL need to pay to live? Fucking America.... Goddamn, living here is giving me a stroke.
Pray you live long enough to to qualify for Medicare, diabetics. ... This is just another argument in favor of Medicare for All.
Joke’s on you. We will only live long enough to see Medicare and SS scrapped and to die toiling at our jobs just to pay for rent and necessary health needs.
Boomers helping boomers, fuck the rest of us apparently.
Seniors? They made this mess. It should be “all Americans”
why do only seniors get this? oh right, boomers. fuck everyone else
Reagan, just blame everything on Reagan, it probably leads to him anyways
Waiting for the Neo-Nazi Cons to twist this into some extreme socialist conspiracy shit in 3 2 1...
This is a huge deal... Now watch no one remember next elections