Honest Talk About Healthcare

The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) doesn't provide for everyone to get healthcare and often hurts the poor. It does let people with pre-existing health issues get care at a better rate and that is good; but, it does nothing to bring down the cost of pharmaceuticals. The insurance companies love it because they make lots of money and basically have monopolies within states. No, I do not like Obamacare.

The GOP plan and the Paul Ryan plan are even worse for most people and don't fix any of the problems of Obamacare. These plans do however provide tax breaks for the wealthy. I don't like either of those plans. We don't yet know what Trump is going to propose, so I can't talk about it yet.

The real question is not which of the bad plans above is the best; but, how should healthcare work in the United States. Should everyone have healthcare? What is the purpose of healthcare insurance? Should we regulate the cost of healthcare? How should we pay for healthcare as a nation or is it everyone for themselves?

I am for universal healthcare even if you cannot afford it yourself. There are a number of ways we can achieve this while bringing down costs. How do I know this? Because other countries do this. Medicaid and Medicare could be expanded so everyone could use it. That wouldn't be hard to do and everyone gets social security. We could create true socialized medicine as is done in Europe and Canada. We could also stop giving pharmaceutical companies patents and the government could produce the drugs that people use, that would bring down drug costs immensely. There are lots of things we could do. Congress is not exploring any alternatives to Obamacare that would bring down drug costs or provide universal coverage because the wealthy would have to pay more.