> suggest high-level collaborators in the local military
This - almost guaranteed that this was a negotiated outcome/coup from the military.
Also it's telling i had to scroll halfway down the page to find the first non "trump therefore bad" comment. The cognitive dissonance of the posters vis a vis Machado is pretty astounding.
It's really a shame topics like this attract such lazy ideological struggle on HN. Reiterating Trump=bad over and over simply doesn't make for interesting conversation regardless of how true it may be.
Even on this particular story, there are so many interesting HN-worthy details to discuss. Instead we're stuck lazily debating whether this was right or wrong.
You can find higher-quality, much more aggressively moderated conversations on topics like this on r/CredibleDefense. However, even that subreddit struggles with the traffic from high-profile events like this.
I only did because that's the phrasing everyone uses for describing our operations in the middle east. Those are bad, but doing the same in South America is good because evil drug traffickers?
Bronze plan is shitty catastrophic insurance at like 5x the actuarial cost to try to fund risk pool and all the mandated benefits thst the o/p alluded to
Off the top of my head maternity/neonatal/family planning type of benefits are mandatory for obamacare compliant plans. That essentially outlawed all the affordable young adult catastrophic plans.
What you're, essentially, advocating for is a massive increase in premiums for families so that people without children can get a tax cut. Which would objectively benefit me, but would be incredibly disastrous for American society in general which is already struggling with insane family care costs. I would really hope you could see why the second order effects on such a change would be a bad idea.
I have spent some time looking at healthcare costs, but I have not seen maternity/neonatal/family planning as a significant driver of costs. It would be surprising if so, given falling birthrates and growth in the elderly population.
> the previous administration thought everyone should be "temporarily" paying for her plan. Moving money from person A to person B obviously doesn't make anything cheaper
No, but it means I can't pay for a first-class ticket while someone else survives. I'll take that deal.
I support subsidies to help low-income citizens who legitimately can't afford health insurance, but some of the temporary ACA subsidies passed in 2021 were ridiculous. They were handing out cash to early retirees as young as age 55 with incomes over 400% of the poverty line.
I don't want my tax dollars wasted on subsidizing them. Give the money to someone who actually needs it.
(Of course the real problem is healthcare costs accelerating out of control. Insurance subsidies won't fix that problem. In fact they make it worse by encouraging healthcare providers and drug companies to raise prices even faster.)
If we start to think about who "actually needs" things, we need to question whether any of the very wealthy "actually need" their wealth. I would be fine with seizing all of anyone's income (including unrealized capital gains) in excess of, say, $20 million just to give everyone else some cute stickers and lollipops. The giant flow of wealth to those at the top is a far greater misallocation than any amount towards the healthcare of anyone not at the top.
> some of the temporary ACA subsidies passed in 2021 were ridiculous. They were handing out cash to early retirees as young as age 55 with incomes over 400% of the poverty line
These are legitimate complaints. Trashing the system because it's overly generous in some respects is insane.
Income isn't wealth. Someone making $62,000/yr in income without working at 55 (i.e. no Social Security) is likely comfortable. That's >$1m in invested assets plus whatever is owed to them as retirement income when they reach retirement age. It's especially unclear if everyone else's payroll taxes should be spent allowing this person to retire a few years earlier.
This is all before including the other large personal expense (housing) for this person is likely imputed rents from homeownership which aren't counted as income but function that way.
Surely you are capable of thinking there are tradeoffs here where one can set a level without dealing in absolutes. Put differently why not expand Medicaid to cover every American regardless of income? 400% is just as arbitrary as 1000000%.
I do actually think that universal healthcare is the best policy. But that will mean some wealthy people get coverage paid for by the state, which aggravates some people.
A substantial amount of discussion in early retirement communities is about how to stay below 400% AGI, which is why I found it odd to see a criticism of healthcare subsidies going to early retirees in the context of the expanded subsidies.
Great then you have even bigger problems to wrestle with regarding solvency. Americans won't choose cost effective treatments, and if you force them to pay out of pocket for experimental therapy you will be accused of running death panels. Good luck with that. On top of all that, they are also unhealthy due to a variety of lifestyle factors including that their primary mode of transportation likes maiming them.
I’m one of those retirees. It’s OK. I was prepared for this, and can afford it, but a hell of a lot of others on a fixed income, are totally screwed.
> Give the money to someone who actually needs it.
Like billionaires. They are the ones that really need it, and they get it; every time. Those yachts don’t pay for themselves.
If anyone thinks poors will be getting any help, they are fooling themselves. Helping poor people is quite unpopular, in the US (where they conveniently forget that most of them are born in the US white, but politicians make it seem as if they are all dark-skinned immigrants). Many of the hardest-hit states will be ones that enthusiastically voted for this.
GP is saying that they’re okay giving up buying first-class tickets if it means someone else gets to live. (Because they pay more for health insurance, which allows someone else to pay less.)
It’s relevant because while the comment says that “they’re okay giving up buying first-class tickets” what they really imply is that they want everyone to give up buying first class tickets.
If they want to constrain their own choices to help a nameless “someone,” they can literally do that themselves without involving the taxpayer at large. Just send the check to HHS or to a specific charity or individual.
As a supporter of single payer(or really, anything else), I support this move. When half the nation is on subsidized healthcare they aren't so likely to care about costs.
Now, you have a lot more angry people, and hopefully that leads to real reform, because what we have now is unsustainable, even to upper middle class families.
HMO laws allowed for-profit healthcare insurance. Groups of doctors banded together and carved out exclusive contracts to sets of hospitals and providers.
Before this I recall seeing $7 taken out of my paycheck and there were no deductibles or copays. Meds were $5.
The govt also acts as a monopsony and forces lower prices. Same effect [0] different mechanism.
[0] actually a better effect - the govt actually does force lower prices, whereas competition is subject to all sorts of other effects where it doesn't actually function to lower prices.
Bronze plans with $5-6k deductibles have always ran more than what people paid for rent. Healthcare is the one thing that's outpaced inflation in higher education.
Very good unsubsidized health insurance wasn’t anywhere close to 2k/month inflation adjusted the last time I used COBRA to continue my employer’s insurance after getting laid off.
The underlying issue is inflation adjusted healthcare related spending increased 6x per person since 1970. Some of that is an increase in quality, but middleman are a huge factor.
So first you say it has always cost this much, but in the next breath you say that its cost has outpaced a high rate of inflation. Mathematically, these can't both be true.
Every upgrade you have have to go back and turn/GPO off various Copilot, MSN ads-in-your-start-menu and MSFT Rewards (the f that even is?) things. Same thing for Edge; drove me back to firefox.
Feigning victimhood and zero agency is very trendy in certain circles, and you evidently get bonus points for these sorts of performantive theatrics, versus actually adressing the core of the issue.
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