Comments by "Dan A" (@DanA-nl5uo) on "Yang Admits He's Been Lying About Medicare For All" video.

I want a choice in who provides my healthcare not who makes me go bankrupt paying for it. The "choice" in insurance argument is just a corpate talking point. When you are facing a cancer diagnosis do you want to have to choose a payment plan? I would much rather simply have the ability to ask my doctor who is the best expert in dealing with my issue. Besides I have never had a choice in my insurance company. The corporate HR department makes that decision for me. My employer tells me if you work here you have to pay for this "benefit" unless you can prove you have insurance from elsewhere. As a single person ofcourse I don't have any other coverage so I have no choice but to let my employer take money out of my paycheck and give it to the insurance company they picked for me.
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@KEVINLOPEZ-np4kj so your employer pays x percent of a bad plan and you think it is a choice to pay 100% of a better plan out of pocket? Because that is what you fail to understand is Bernie Sanders wants to make Healthcare the same a public roads no cost at the point of service and our entire society pays for it based on a progressive tax structure. The other candidates never tell you how much you will have to pay as an individual to buy health insurance from the government. They are just trying to trick you into a public option added to the ACA by calling it Medicare which it is not.
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Under Bernie Sanders M4A private insurance would be allowed to cover anything that Medicare doesn't cover. It is how our current system works here in the USA. If you are on Medicare today you can carry supplemental insurance as well to cover anything not covered by Medicare.
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@greenith no yang is trying to trick Americans into accepting a public option added to the ACA by calling it Medicare choice. But it is not at all the same thing. Yang isn't saying that he will provide a progressive tax structure to pay for his healthcare plan. He isn't saying it will expand the risk pool to 100% of the population lowering cost. What he is saying is the private sector will be allowed to continue to cherry pick the healthy people to profit off and force the sickest people to be covered by the government. Today that is the case with Medicare and Medicaid covering the highest risk members of our society. This allows the insurance companies to socialize the cost while privatizing the profits. All yang and the other corpate Democrats are offering is for you to be able to buy into the high risk pool if you don't like the private market. But that will by definition faul because you are forced to buy into the government insurance which is already covering the sickest people so it has the highest costs. The corporatist love this because they can trick people into thinking the government plan is expensive because of the argument that government never does thing right. But the reality is they are the insurers of last resort. The only way single payer works is to cover the entire society as has been proven the world over. Yang and anyone else defending the current system is just trying to protect corpate profits.
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@greenith when it comes to Healthcare the answer is simple Bernie Sanders has done his homework and the system is proven in Canada Scandinavia France Germany I could go on but every other developed nation has some version of single payer and they pay half what we pay per capita. You can play wack a mole as to if the drug companies or the hospital are responsible for the price gouging but the bottom line is you can not allow a profit motive when people will die without the service. Other countries have solved this problem have the government pay for and regulate the healthcare sector. If you don't understand how the risk pool factors into mixing public and private insurance you need to understand how insurance companies work to make a profit.
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@fraserwatson3034 if you give everyone in society x dollars per month all you did was devalue the dollar while adding to the federal budget. UBI is the same failed concept as saying poor people need to pay taxes on the income they need to just survive but in reverse. Both plans fail because they refuse to realize that income inequality is the problem and our tax code and socal safety nets only stabilize our society when they address this basic issue. By the way calling it universal when it is means tested is Orwellian. Anytime someone has to use language tricks to make their idea sound like something it isn't they know they have a bad plan and are trying to trick you.
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@fraserwatson3034 there was not notable inflation when the government printed money to bail out the banks because the money went to the wealthy elite. The top 3 people in the USA own more wealth then the bottom 50% of the population. When you give 0.1% of the population 3 trillion dollars there is no way they can spend that money so it is pulled out of the economy and exists only as larger numbers in their investment portfolio. If you give that same 3 trillion dollars to the remaining 99.9% of the population most of us will have to spend it simply to pay our daily expenses. That is what causes hyperinflation in places like Zimbabwe. The USA does have a buffer in the fact that our currency is the international currency of trade but that is a longer discussion. I will just say that fact has been a key factor in why we have run up 20 trillion in national debt since WWII without having the austerity problems Spain or Greece have. By the way we are still doing quantitative easing as we speak in the financial sector which is printing money to bail out the banks. Dylan Ratigan discussed it recently on the Jimmy Doore show. But to your other point about the VAT funding the UBI. VAT is a tax on consumption same as a sales tax and will by definition drive up the cost of goods. Like all consumption based taxes it is regressive by nature because the wealthy elite do not spend anywhere near the same percentage of their wealth to buy the goods and services they need every single day. Then as others have pointed out Yang wants to cancel out the UBI for poor people who use other forms of government assistance. That is clearly regressive it in effect is giving the wealthy elite the same food stamps benefit that a poor person gets only as UBI checks. His entire system sounds great if you don't dig into it but if you know the real problem is income inequality you quickly realize that Yang is someone who benefits from income inequality trying to trick you into voting to increase the problem and continue the flow of wealth to the top of our society. If the Bernie Sanders and Warren are correct that you have to restructure our tax code to address income inequality. Yang is wrong with his approach of taxing consumption not wealth. You can do a study of the effects of VAT taxes in Europe and income inequality and you will quickly see that a VAT increases the costs of goods and is regressive. Yang is a pludocrat trying to trick you into voting for a system which continues to help his class out. What we need is programs like Medicare for All which have greater benefits for the poor and working class then the wealthy elite. This is because it gives the poor something they currently lack that the wealthy currently have. We also need to raise funding from wealth and progressive income taxes which will close the income inequality gap. Yang's plans don't do this.
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@fraserwatson3034 you don't care if a rich person gets the same benefit you get because you don't understand how income inequality had damaged our society. You need to spend more time listening to Bernie Sanders. Your argument that no poor person would not Benifit from an extra $1000 per month is easy disprove by anyone who has studied any economy going through hyperinflation. Giving the same addition money to all members of society will just result in inflation. Yang hides that inflation in the form of Taxation with the VAT but the reality is if you give 100% of society $1000 per month and raise that same money from a tax on spending then the poor who spend the $1000 each month because they spend 100% of their money pay more of the VAT tax then the wealthy elite who put that $1000 UBI check into an investment account because there in no tax on investment with a VAT only on consumption. That system has to inflate prices by the amount of the VAT and increases income inequality by the ratio of spending vs saving of the UBI across the wealth spectrum.
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@greenith I don't know why you are apposed to Bernie Sanders plan it doesn't ban private insurance either it allows it to cover anything that is not covered by Medicare. I simply don't want to allow the private for profit system to cherry pick privatize the profits while socializing the costs like they already do today with Medicare and Medicaid.
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@greenith no you don't understand the problem with the public option version is that Medicare is not able to be cost competitive because it has an unfair burder of being the insurance of last resort so it has much higher costs. We are not in agreement that the only difference is implantation because one system is designed to fail.
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@steadmanuhlich6734 your welcome
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@zenzmurfy wrong about the minimum wage vs UBI. Min wage raises only the poor and addresses income inequality. UBI gives the same benefit to 100% of society which means it by definition doesn't address income inequality but simply increases the supply of dollars in the economy. When you increase the supply of money in an economy alone it causes inflation. That is very basic ecominic theory proven the world over from war time Germany to modern Zimbabwe.
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@zenzmurfy only if you believe our government runs a balanced budget. Spoiler alert there are over 20 trillion reasons to believe that government programs are not fully funded. But given our current tax code fully funded in taxes would actually only transfer more wealth to the wealthy elite because our tax code favors them not the working class. Yang definitely will hurt the working class with his sales tax.
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@zenzmurfy the VAT doesn't tax wealth as in savings and insanely high income. It is a tax on consumption same as a sales tax. This is regressive because those who have the lease income have to spend more of their income to simply buy the basics in life. Someone like Jeff Bezos doesn't spend even 1% of his income on food or a basic studio apartment and basic minimum clothing. But the person who is just barley earning a living wage spends 100% of their income on simple basics so you tax 100% of their income equivalent to taxing less then 1% of Jeff Bezos income for the same basics they purchase. It is very simple to understand why any tax on consumption is regressive once you realize that income inequality results in wealth people having saving that far exceed their earning or spending. We need a heavy progressive estate tax to break up the class based society which results from generational wealth. The current president is a prime example of that peoblem he and his children would be living in a trailer park based on Trumps business skills if his father hadn't managed to pass down a fortune to him. But we also need to simplify the tax code and eliminate all the loopholes. Go back to where the income tax started where you only pay a tax on earning over the cost of living. I would set the standard deduction to the minimum wage x the 40 hour work week x 52 weeks. There would be no deductions beyond that and all earnings would be considered income regardless of the source. The tax rate would be progressive with the top bracket back in the 90% range it was in during the golden age of economic growth in this nation. Oh and as someone who was a controls engineer for 20 years designing automated industrial equipment I don't buy the hype about automation. AOC is correct that there is plenty of work which we need to do as a country to keep full employment.
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