Your ideas for healthcare reform (Corporate Profit, minimum wage, solutions, myths)
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Here is the problem with the 'free market' solution.
It has never actually been tried in a large developed country so we don't know whether it would be cheaper or more efficient than the UHC alternative.
On the other hand, UHC has been tried and works in multiple developed countries. It delivers as good or better health care than we have right now and it costs about half as much as we pay now.
So why would we experiment with a free market solution when we know that UHC works and is a whole lot cheaper?
Private sector money destroys more than it creates as huge profits are the goal.
The NHS in the UK has had no problems since its conception in 1948 but today there are some problems.
There are Hospitals now in the UK that are having big money problems. A Hospital in the UK may even go into bankruptcy............. why???????????????
A few years ago the Conservative Govt. created a Private Finance Initiative for the NHS. This meant the introduction of Private companies to fund the building etc of some Hospitals. The Labour Govt. expanded the scheme................. well suprise suprise, the excessive interest being paid now by the tax payer to the private companies is soooooo huge it is threatening to bankrupt a Hospital and maybe more....... this has NEVER happened before when the private sector was NOT involved in the NHS.
This should be a huge incentive for the USA to get rid of Private sector health care as the main health system in the USA.............. IT DOESN'T WORK and is only good news for the private companies......
that is why millions in the USA have no health care............. private greed!
I would rather pay the 100-200 dollars for a single office visit, than to be paying the 6-12k in insurance premuims or federal taxes to a UHC
its really a no brainer...which is better $200 at the time of the visit..or a MONTHLY fee of 400 or more
get rid of ALL insurance...private and government
you want the SERVICE of a doctor...pay for it
you want the service of a nurse..pay for it
dont make nurses and doctors a min wage slaves to the government
Until you get a bill for it! You may be an exception, but pollyrobin is married to a doctor and, I believe, works in his office, and I work in a dr's office. We have a whole trove of experience with this.
I would follow one of the countless successful examples of universal healthcare that exist in the world rather than some of the crazy experiments that the Republicans on this thread are throwing out.
~16% of the American economy is healthcare spending....over 8% of that is private. Now, in a single-payer world with full access across the board you'd have greater consumption, and unless you offered the system through medicare advantage style plans (which I somehow doubt most single-payer advocates intend) you'd have far less cost controls built into the system, so, you're probably talking substantially more than 8% of the economy to pay for it, but, I'm going to go with the initial 8% figure for simplicities sake.
Now, our current GDP is $15 Trillion dollars. .08 * 15 = $1.2 trillion a year. Where the heck are you going to come up with $1.2 trillion a year?
To give some context, the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan war are often estimated at around $3 trillion. So imagine doing a repeat of Iraq/Afghanistan where we pick 2 medium-sized countries at random to invade every 2.5 years and then stay there for a decade, and you have a rough idea of the cost.
Another way to think about it is by comparing to current entitlements. Social security, for example, cost 600 billion a year in 2008 (most recent date available on wikipedia table). So you could for the same price fund social security, twice.
Or you could compare to discretionary spending. This is all the non-entitlement, non-military, non-debt payment stuff the government does. Everything from education to energy to research to agriculture to infrastructure to federal jobs to law enforcement the list goes on. This all costs about the same amount as social security. Single payer then would cost twice this.
Want to pay for it by dismantling the military? You don't have nearly enough cash there either: again, excluding the Iraq/Afghan wars, also similar to the cost of social security (all three are about 20% of the federal budget) so you're only halfway there.
What about raising taxes to pay for it? Well, the current total tax take of the federal government is 2.3 trillion a year. So, you'd have to raise every single federal tax by 52% to pay for it. Of course, that assumes you wouldn't cause a major depression by doing so, so in reality you'd need to raise by even more to compensate for the fact that the economy would get significantly smaller after the crisis that would be caused by jacking up every single federal tax by half to start with.
Let's say for illustrative purposes you wanted to limit yourself to raising specific taxes. Income tax is 1 trillion, so, if you DOUBLED income tax and then went in for 20% more on top of that you'd get there.
Or you could do it by raising corporate taxes........actually, nevermind, you can't: corporate taxes, at 181 billion would have to be multiplied by 6 times to cover single payer....that's a nominal rate of over 100%.
Its easy to argue for single payer if you imagine we live in a world of inexhaustible resources but, there just isn't a feasible way of paying for it.
Dismantling the current system and instituting a system similar to say, Canada's, would drastically lower this number by getting rid of the immense amount of overhead and administrative costs of our current healthcare system. Of the remaining cost, about 50% of it is already covered by taxes through medicaid and medicare. The remaining costs can be covered through taxes and spending cuts.
The best thing that could happen won't. That would be for government to get its nose completely out of it.
Unfortunately, it's too late to go back. This is what always happens when the government gains a toehold. It's unbelievable how quickly the government can ruin a good thing.
You mean all those countries in Western Europe that have better health care, higher life expectancy, more doctors per capita, with cheaper prices are doing something wrong!?
You mean all those countries in Western Europe that have better health care, higher life expectancy, more doctors per capita, with cheaper prices are doing something wrong!?
One thing i have noticed since living here is how the private sector has complete control. There is no way that the Insurance companies, banks, companies etc would get away with the prices they charge here or how they treat their employees, in the UK.
We've been over this before: You are paying more than single payer would cost right now. All the redundant work, bureaucracy and payments run by Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans, Childrens, Indians etc cost more in total than single payer would. Replace them with Single Payer, and you could drop income taxes a bit of the savings made. (Not that any politican would, but you'd save money)
You are also not considering the fact that Medicare and Medicaid already covers the most expensive patient groups. The 35 or so % of the American people already covered by governemnt health care are considerably more expensive than the ones in employment, whose taxes pay for it all.
Didn't I show you the numbers in the last thread?
Current government programs don't cover all of peoples' costs: medicare for example only covers about half. A single-payer plan would have to pay the other half plus the costs of people who either have private coverage or no coverage.
Further the claim that "All the redundant work, bureaucracy and payments run by Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans, Childrens, Indians etc cost more in total than single payer would" is just flat out wrong. Which you would have known if you had done some basic research and arithmetic. Medicare advantage programs average better than 83% of dollars spent on medical care and direct medicare does even better; there is no reason why other existing programs should do worse. The massive administrative savings you think there are from consolidating programs are simply in your imagination - the simple, numerical fact of the matter (I am using wikipedia to source my numbers btw, incase anyone is wondering; they tend to be pretty accurate in these things) is that most dollars are spent on care.
Let's say you have an absolute best-case (in the sense that it would be "best" at supporting your claims) scenario where 15% of costs are administrative and you can get that down to about 5% with single payer AND you don't have any increase in utilization from increased access (neither of these assumptions is realistic, but, I'm constructing the best possible case for your argument even if it stretches a little). You're still looking for about 950 billion dollars in additional annual revenue to pay for it. Which is still several hundred billion bigger than the annual cost of the peacetime US military.
edit:
Quote:
Originally Posted by InsaneTraveler
Dismantling the current system and instituting a system similar to say, Canada's, would drastically lower this number by getting rid of the immense amount of overhead and administrative costs of our current healthcare system. Of the remaining cost, about 50% of it is already covered by taxes through medicaid and medicare. The remaining costs can be covered through taxes and spending cuts.
Public sector overhead is some number I don't exactly know below 17%.
Private sector overhead was limited by law in the ACA to 15% for most insurance plans and 20% for a handful of smaller ones. There is also overhead at the actual hospital/doctors office/etc., but, this is unavoidable.
No system will have zero overhead. Realistically you're not going much below 5% regardless of what you do.
So let's say that overall private/public payer-side overhead is 17% (this is probably an overestimate, but, when one makes assumptions best to lean against one's own case, which I am doing here) and we get that down to 5% with no losses to more use of care, less efficient use of care, etc. That is a savings of about .12 * .16 * $15 trillion = ~288 billion, and represents an unrealistically high best case. That isn't chump change, but, it doesn't get you anywhere close to paying for single payer. In fact, it doesn't even fill the gap between the cost of single payer and the savings from, say yet again, dismantling the entire peacetime US military.
Last edited by ALackOfCreativity; 06-26-2012 at 05:18 PM..
Current government programs don't cover all of peoples' costs: medicare for example only covers about half. A single-payer plan would have to pay the other half plus the costs of people who either have private coverage or no coverage.
Further the claim that "All the redundant work, bureaucracy and payments run by Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans, Childrens, Indians etc cost more in total than single payer would" is just flat out wrong. Which you would have known if you had done some basic research and arithmetic. Medicare advantage programs average better than 83% of dollars spent on medical care and direct medicare does even better; there is no reason why other existing programs should do worse. The massive administrative savings you think there are from consolidating programs are simply in your imagination - the simple, numerical fact of the matter (I am using wikipedia to source my numbers btw, incase anyone is wondering; they tend to be pretty accurate in these things) is that most dollars are spent on care.
Let's say you have an absolute best-case (in the sense that it would be "best" at supporting your claims) scenario where 15% of costs are administrative and you can get that down to about 5% with single payer AND you don't have any increase in utilization from increased access (neither of these assumptions is realistic, but, I'm constructing the best possible case for your argument even if it stretches a little). You're still looking for about 950 billion dollars in additional annual revenue to pay for it. Which is still several hundred billion bigger than the annual cost of the peacetime US military.
edit:
Public sector overhead is some number I don't exactly know below 17%.
Private sector overhead was limited by law in the ACA to 15% for most insurance plans and 20% for a handful of smaller ones. There is also overhead at the actual hospital/doctors office/etc., but, this is unavoidable.
No system will have zero overhead. Realistically you're not going much below 5% regardless of what you do.
So let's say that overall private/public payer-side overhead is 17% (this is probably an overestimate, but, when one makes assumptions best to lean against one's own case, which I am doing here) and we get that down to 5% with no losses to more use of care, less efficient use of care, etc. That is a savings of about .12 * .16 * $15 trillion = ~288 billion, and represents an unrealistically high best case. That isn't chump change, but, it doesn't get you anywhere close to paying for single payer. In fact, it doesn't even fill the gap between the cost of single payer and the savings from, say yet again, dismantling the entire peacetime US military.
Where do you get this number? And I am assuming you are meaning 17% of the total cost of healthcare as relative to GDP?
I am not seeing where you are getting these numbers either ".12 * .16 *"
Also, I am fully accepting of higher taxes and spending cuts in other areas to fund a universal form of healthcare if there were shortfalls in the funding.
We've been over this before: You are paying more than single payer would cost right now. All the redundant work, bureaucracy and payments run by Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans, Childrens, Indians etc cost more in total than single payer would. Replace them with Single Payer, and you could drop income taxes a bit of the savings made. (Not that any politican would, but you'd save money)
You are also not considering the fact that Medicare and Medicaid already covers the most expensive patient groups. The 35 or so % of the American people already covered by governemnt health care are considerably more expensive than the ones in employment, whose taxes pay for it all.
Didn't I show you the numbers in the last thread?
The above post is hilarious.
I could just see The United States Of Ret****stan having single payer.......me, you and all 20-30 million illegals. Corrupt, insane, incompetent USA running single payer.....what a total disaster that would be.................can you see a boondoggle like Medicare and multiply the waste, fraud, abuse by 1000..........hahaha!!!!!
Americababwe is run by corrupt ret***s.
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