Not OP, but I automate collecting public meeting data from various local agencies across the US. The below resources might be helpful. Public meeting video can be captured using yt-dlp (and if not made public, obtained with a FOIA request), archived, transcribed, etc. Sometimes there is an RSS feed, otherwise use an LLM provider as an extractor engine against the target datastore.
I _think_ (but am not actually certain) we're monitoring more municipal agencies at CivicBand, but I know some of the folks at MuckRock and the work they're doing is absolutely critical.
We cannot afford both, the elderly are too expensive current state. 1/4th of Medicare spending is someone's last year of life. So, life expectancy has ballooned spending on the elderly while not paying for child healthcare.
Medicare’s Real Fiscal Crisis Is Much Worse than Trust Fund Insolvency - https://www.cato.org/blog/medicares-real-fiscal-crisis-much-... - October 8th, 2025 ("Medicare isn’t just facing a trust fund shortfall—it’s threatening America’s entire fiscal future. While headlines warn that the Hospital Insurance (HI) Trust Fund2 will run out in 2033, the real danger comes from a different part of the program: Supplementary Medical Insurance (SMI). SMI refers to Medicare spending by Part B (doctors’ visits and outpatient services) and Part D (prescription drugs). Unlike the HI fund, SMI is set up to take whatever it needs from taxpayers—no limits, no debate. In 2024 alone, Medicare Parts B and D financed under SMI added $498 billion straight onto the national credit card. Unless Congress makes fundamental reforms to Medicare, federal healthcare spending will drive the US toward a catastrophic fiscal crisis.")
Medicare Spending at the End of Life: A Snapshot of Beneficiaries Who Died in 2014 and the Cost of Their Care - https://www.kff.org/medicare/medicare-spending-at-the-end-of... - July 14th, 2016 ("Of the 2.6 million people who died in the U.S. in 2014, 2.1 million, or eight out of 10, were people on Medicare, making Medicare the largest insurer of medical care provided at the end of life. Spending on Medicare beneficiaries in their last year of life accounts for about 25% of total Medicare spending on beneficiaries age 65 or older. The fact that a disproportionate share of Medicare spending goes to beneficiaries at the end of life is not surprising given that many have serious illnesses or multiple chronic conditions and often use costly services, including inpatient hospitalizations, post-acute care, and hospice, in the year leading up to their death.")
Because you are not providing facts, just feelings. I am here to argue facts, not feelings. The citations in my comment you replied to literally describe why this spending is unsustainable and we cannot afford it and your response is "nah". Can't debate ignoring facts.
The facts are that we have been paying for Medicare since the 1960s and are legally obligated to continue paying for it indefinitely, as pointed out in one of your citations. That's literally all I said in my last post. In the previous post, I also said that children are inexpensive to insure, which is also empirically true.
The citations you provided are well researched, concerning, raise valid points, and include many facts, but your conclusions based on them are only very strongly held opinions.
This is now the third time you've jumped down my throat for no reason, so feel free to go harass someone else going forward. And the next time you wonder why you don't have much support for your preferred policies, look in the mirror, because I suspect I agree with you on most if not all of these matters but want nothing to do with a discussion with you about them.
Take the poll in 2026 after ACA subsides evaporate and Medicaid cuts. Highest satisfaction is for government run insurance (Medicare, Medicaid, Tricare).
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-are-sati... ("Overall, 82% of Americans said they’re satisfied with their health care coverage, including a third who said they are very satisfied with their current coverage. The group that reported being the most satisfied were older adults, with 9 in 10 Americans over 65 years old saying they were satisfied. And 42% in that age group reported being “very satisfied.”. Roughly 9 in 10 of those who have public health insurance coverage through Medicare or Medicaid also reported being satisfied with coverage, compared to 77% of those with private health care coverage.")
https://www.citizen.org/article/public-support-for-medicare-... ("Support for Medicare-for-All continues to rise, whether in Congress, state legislatures, or among the American people. Recent polls indicate that six in ten Americans support Medicare-for-All. In addition, more than 60 percent believe that government is responsible for ensuring health coverage for all Americans. And nearly 70 percent of all voters, including battleground voters, identify health care as an important issue in upcoming elections.")
Yes, it's noted in the poll I linked (which is the same one as your first link) that the highest satisfaction is with government run insurance.
Not enough people are on ACA with subsidies to move the poll results that much, and Medicaid cuts aren't going to make people less satisfied with their private insurance.
I have no idea why you and so many other people seem to be taking my explanation as to why the US doesn't adopt universal socialized medicine as some sort of endorsement of the status quo.
> Do undocumented immigrants qualify for federal healthcare benefits?
No. Undocumented immigrants do not have access to federally funded healthcare coverage, including Medicaid, Medicare, or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). They are also unable to purchase health insurance coverage from the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Marketplace.
In fairness this does not work in practice. If a child is rushed to the hospital with a life threatening injury no US doctor is going to send them away. America is not really evil it just likes to LARP it.
As the very piece we're discussing mentions, the care in question for children is not emergency care. I assert America is evil, because these are active healthcare policy choices. We could fix this today with enough Congressional votes, it is a choice not to.
Right, they shouldn't have access to ACA, nor should a citizen of Denmark or India. They are foreign nationals and including them in the 4 million uninsured children in the US statistic makes the statistic worthless.
My issue with this article is it suggests there's some massive child uninsured problem in the US, but to get that number they're including foreign citizens. If we included all of south america I'm sure we could find tens of millions of uninsured people. If we included the rest of the world it might be closer to hundreds of millions. That doesn't mean there's a problem with the ACA. There could be a problem with it, but this 4 million number doesn't get us closer to an answer.
So you believe this number is a material amount of undocumented children and not US citizens? Can you prove this assertion? Numbers I was able to find indicate 1-1.1 million undocumented children in the US under 18. Let us assume they are a part of this 4 million stat for the sake of argument. What about the other 3 million children? Is 3 million children not a "massive child uninsured problem"? I believe its an emergency, but I am curious what the other side of that argument is.
To be frank, through policy, we can see that the federal government hates children through Medicaid cuts and states not expanding Medicaid and making it easy to get coverage for children. This is objective fact, based on the data. Otherwise, there would be zero uninsured US citizen children. The message is clear: don't have children in the US, or get out of the US if you intend to have children and can. If you are stuck in the US by having the misfortune to have been born on the wrong soil and without means to leave, my condolences for bad luck.
> “Especially in today’s climate, there are families where the child is a citizen and the parent is an immigrant, and they’re fearful of interacting with government,” Alker says. But such fears can only explain a small proportion of those who are uninsured, she notes.
So what's your goal here? My patience level is incredibly thin for people that are very clearly taking the article out of context to push some remarkably dumb agenta.
My point is, and remains, that you can't use figures like the one that headlines the article if it includes unrelated data like foreign nationals. The reasoning is because it ends with the exact situation we have now. What we know for sure is the US has a free health care system (ACA) for those who actually need it, I know because I've used it. What we don't know is how many children are uninsured, because the data they're relying on is worthless. Using fake data and then claiming "it's probably not off by much" doesn't contribute much to the overall discussion.
I'd also like to point out HN isn't really for political discussion, it's for technical discussion. This is a methodology issue in the article, not my personal opinions on US health care.
Why Young People Are Struggling to Communicate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46275867 - December 2025
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