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Of course Medicare for all would save money because hospital after hospital and doctor after doctor are dropping Medicare. More people will have a harder and harder tme finding anyone to treat them but that's hussein obama's goal after all.
"More broadly, I suspect that the elderly account for half or more of the total health care costs of the entire population."
Not exactly a compelling argument. That isn't to say it isn't correct, only that you can't really prove anything when you start with an assumption one step away from your conclusion.
I don't see how increasing the demand for something--by offering universal coverage--without also dealing with the supply will lower the total cost. Interference with one side without similar interference on the other side will result in significant inefficiencies (as it already does). Free them both (by removing employer incentives, making health insurance more like auto or homeowners insurance, etc.) or control them both (by having government run health care, publicly trained and obligated doctors, etc.) depending on your ideological leaning.
Not to mention that Medicare payout rates are so ar below par that it is getting harder and harder to find a provider. If all were on Medicare, I imagine we would see the medical profession move down on the list of selections by young Americans.
No kidding
The Mayo Clinic has just announced that it will stop taking Medicare patients at its Arizona clinic. They say they just can't afford it. They lost $840 million last year across all their clinics - just on Medicare alone. That decision may be extended to their other facilities depending on a study they are doing over the next couple years. They say that the 3,000 Medicare patients served at the Arizona clinic will have to pay nearly $2,000 out of pocket if they want to stay with their physicians.
Remember, "if you like the coverage you now have, you will be able to keep it" -- but nobody thought to ask, "Mr. President, how much extra will it cost me?"
yes I have read it,, and like most of the garbage that comes out of washington, it is just that garbage
the first thing to remember is that INSURANCE is not CARE
the next thing is to look at ANY of these bills....they do NOTHING to lower or even control the COST of the CARE IT SELF
do any of these bills, or even a SPS going to lower the cost of a xray or mri???..will they lower the cost of the machine itself???...will they lower the pay of the tech working the machine???...will they lower the property taxes on a doctors office, or his electric bill, or supply costs.....NONE at ALL.
should all doctors be paid exactly the same as another......does that even go for when you compare the best doctors with the quacks??????
look at the facts
you and everyone else will say that governent care (ie medicare/medicaid) have lower admin costs....I'll give you that.....
but facts remain...medicare cost 500 BILLION to PARTIALLY cover 45 million.....to cover 310 million (6.88 times) would mean the cost would be AT LEAST 3.4 trillion YEAR
who and, how, would it be paid for?????
the taxes listed would not even pay for 1/10th of it
There has been research done to find out how to deliver the most appropriate and efficient care and this has even been required reading at the White House. Now if and how the research is put into action in health reform is another matter. Here's a snippet.
"And some of the answers that they gave me were alarming. There were massive numbers of physicians, large numbers of physicians, who were now buying up their own imaging centers, surgical centers. And what they were describing to me was a world where medicine had become a business, where the desire to—there’s always, in any system, a conflict between the way you can make money and the way you can take good care of patients. And the incentives in our healthcare system as a whole have been screwy. With a fee-for-service system, if you do more, you get paid more. That leads to more surgery, more radiology. And you saw it in McAllen. They were doing twice as many heart operations, twice as many pacemaker placements. And home healthcare spending was through the roof. There was a sense in which the culture of medicine had gone to an extreme that we don’t want to approach as a country."
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