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posted by martyb on Thursday March 08 2018, @12:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the actually...599-IS-prime dept.

Amazon launches a low-cost version of Prime for Medicaid recipients

Amazon announced this morning it will offer a low-cost version of its Prime membership program to qualifying recipients of Medicaid. The program will bring the cost of Prime down from the usual $10.99 per month to about half that, at $5.99 per month, while still offering the full range of Prime perks, including free, two-day shipping on millions of products, Prime Video, Prime Music, Prime Photos, Prime Reading, Prime Now, Audible Channels, and more.

The new program is an expansion on Amazon's discounted Prime service for customers on government assistance, launched in June 2017. For the same price of $5.99 per month, Amazon offers Prime memberships to any U.S. customer with a valid EBT card – the card that's used to disburse funds for assistance programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and Women, Infants, and Children Nutrition Program (WIC).

It could be a way to get users with certain health care requirements on board before Amazon launches its own health insurance company.

Also at USA Today.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Thursday March 08 2018, @05:17PM (8 children)

    by fyngyrz (6567) on Thursday March 08 2018, @05:17PM (#649561) Journal

    Not only would a private organization have to compete with a violently imposed monopoly, but it would also have to fund the very competition with which it is supposed to be competing.

    Roads, fire departments, huge numbers of charities, etc. Your "VIM" is entirely too hysterical, even if technically accurate. People / organizations – some of them – do compete, or at least operate in the same space. It's outright ridiculous to hold that up as an excuse for letting people suffer.

    The fact is, without government, and many of its "VIMs", you'd be completely out of luck. Healthcare, in fact, is one of those areas where that's exactly what happens to many people.

    Some people do exert themselves in a charitable manner. The point was, and remains, that not nearly enough of them do despite the obvious needs, and based on the lack of response to those obvious needs at a relatively lower level, there's no reason to think that if the need was greater, that the coverage would somehow be more comprehensive.

    The insurance companies have been converted into specialized payment networks that divorce consumers from producers

    Insurance is a way to pool funds against risk, and (ideally) get the funds to those who need pay for the services. This is not an unnatural consequence of a free marketplace where risk is a profoundly significant factor.

    Government propped-up insurance – the ACA – was intended to increase the pool coverage. It was doing so, hardly ideally, but still it was doing so to the tune of tens of millions of newly covered individuals, and now is degrading rapidly in its end effects because it's been maliciously interfered with rather than actually honed towards a more effective end that more closely approximates what it was intended to do.

    I am all for single payer healthcare and leaving the health insurance industry in the dust. But make no mistake: it's still pooling money and sharing it out to the providers of healthcare. The difference, hopefully, is it wouldn't be leaving people out, which is a severe fault of almost all free market pool systems.

    As far as I'm concerned, the healthcare insurance industry and the individual-payer healthcare system are both long past their sell-by dates; government, however, is not.

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by cmdrklarg on Thursday March 08 2018, @06:33PM (3 children)

    by cmdrklarg (5048) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 08 2018, @06:33PM (#649611)

    The ACA has been maliciously interfered with from day 1. It would have been far more effective without red states actively undermining it. With the current administration it is also able to undermine it further.

    --
    The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
    • (Score: 2) by schad on Thursday March 08 2018, @07:10PM (1 child)

      by schad (2398) on Thursday March 08 2018, @07:10PM (#649626)

      This is an entirely predictable and natural consequence of trying to make a bunch of people do something they don't want to do. Of course they'll try to undermine it at every turn! Why in the world would you ever have expected otherwise?

      It's really exactly the same as what's going on now with immigration, where certain elected officials are basically doing their best to undermine the federal government at every turn using all legal authority they have. In some cases their authority may not even be legal, but until SCOTUS says "no" they still get to do it. Even after SCOTUS says "no" they may continue to do it. There are a lot of ways to get out of doing things you don't want to do, and it takes a lot of court battles -- and a lot of time -- before anyone will force you to do it.

      Thus, if you want health care reform, you need to convince a clear majority of the country that you need it. Anything less and it won't work.

      The good news, assuming you're an advocate for single payer, is that the systematic dismantling of Obamacare is likely to result in at least a few states joining Massachusetts in the ranks of universally insured. Some of them may even go so far as single-payer. If those experiments work out as well as their proponents would like to believe, they'll quickly spread to the rest of the country. Ultimately we'll get something nationally, and there you go.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Friday March 09 2018, @03:17PM

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 09 2018, @03:17PM (#650004)

        Thus, if you want health care reform, you need to convince a clear majority of the country that you need it.

        Historically very low impact. You need to convince a majority of election campaign and national committee donors that you need it.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @08:11PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @08:11PM (#650198)

      Then maybe the Democrats should have just done single payer when they had a supermajority. Instead, we got this mess which doesn't fix the fundamental problems with our health care system; we didn't even get a public option. The Democrats are overall not a very progressive party.

  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday March 08 2018, @07:21PM (3 children)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 08 2018, @07:21PM (#649635) Journal

    Healthcare comes in many different cases, some of which are better handled by universal health care, and some by insurance.

    Insurance *should* be risk pooling. US insurance is more nearly an extortion racket. But back to health care.

    case 1) Basic health care is going to be needed by everyone. Insurance is a bad model for this, as it merely invokes additional parties to be paid.
    case 2) Rare events. This is something that say, 1 in 100 people would have happen to them during their lifetime. One can reasonably argue that this case is justifiably covered by insurance.
    case 3) Optional or cosmetic surgery. This doesn't need to be covered by basic care, and whether insurance should cover it depends on the policy...usually it won't. Save up and pay for it yourself.
    case 4) Public Health. This should definitely be wholly funded by the government. You want contagious diseases suppressed.

    I've artificially created descriptions that seem to have clear boundaries, but they don't. One can rationally argue exactly where each of those boundaries should be. My preference would be to have basic health care expand to include rare events, and get the insurance companies totally out of the health care business.

    --
    Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 08 2018, @07:50PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 08 2018, @07:50PM (#649656)

      Your "Public Health" category doesn't imply that governmental funding is necessary.

      Rather, that too is a matter of risk management; a robust industry of insurance that actually manages risk would be naturally induced by market incentives to set rates in such a way that individuals and organizations take steps to reduce the risk of wide-scale epidemics. For instance, insurance companies could offer premium reductions to airports that screen passengers for sickness. Families could be given reduced premiums for getting their children vaccinated, or for getting a flu shot, etc.

      Now, maybe in the present organization of society, this kind of large-scale risk management is not logistically feasible, but it's not impossible; strictly speaking, "government" is not a necessary solution. Indeed, anybody who is interested in living in a society that could be called "civilized" should be interested in replacing the "government" with something more voluntary, anyway, and that basically means replacing "government" with capitalism.

    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Friday March 09 2018, @03:23PM (1 child)

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 09 2018, @03:23PM (#650011)

      Cases 1 and 2 imply property tax funding for medical care. Its a direct relationship.

      Case 1 virtually all non-ER care my elderly ancestors get comes from the closest provider, and only 1/3 of the US people have jobs, so for 2/3 of the population, closest provider will always be closest to home, where you pay prop tax.

      Case 2 if your transportation system is sub-par or your residents are shitty people, the ER is going to get a lot of incoming trauma patients. Suburbs not so much.

      As far as socialism BS arguments, health care boils down to the same argument as everything else in the local prop tax budget, everyone living here gets what they paid for, however high or low. Parks and rec, schools, police, fire, DOT, etc. Essentially we're already implemented this except with numerous well paid middlemen and we refuse to do it directly, so we do stealth prop tax by billing everyone who lives here for the local monopoly hospital provider via W-2 paycheck deductions, which is a stupid way to pay a property tax.

      • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday March 09 2018, @05:41PM

        by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 09 2018, @05:41PM (#650109) Journal

        There's some legitimacy to your argument, but you'll need to take it up with the supreme court. They decided that cities and counties could not have a residency requirement for social support services.

        --
        Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.