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