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That's how it would play out every year time and time again, for about two years when your entire economy collapsed and you take a real quick trip on a "teleporter" straight to 4th world status.
In case you don't know what 4th world status is it's a status that makes 1980's Somalia look desirable.
You forgot something...
Differentiation is a method to compute the rate at which a dependent output y changes with respect to the change in the independent input x. This rate of change is called the derivative of y with respect to x. In more precise language, the dependence of y upon x means that y is a function of x. This functional relationship is often denoted y = f(x), where f denotes the function. If x and y are real numbers, and if the graph of y is plotted against x, the derivative measures the slope of this graph at each point.
That's how it would play out every year time and time again, for about two years when your entire economy collapsed and you take a real quick trip on a "teleporter" straight to 4th world status.
In case you don't know what 4th world status is it's a status that makes 1980's Somalia look desirable.
And where exactly are you pulling $13,000 from? Last time I checked, average care was $8,000 per person, and you'd see that fall under UHC, not to mention not all of 313,000,000 people will be using that $8,000 a year.
It'd be $2T on the high-end, and as costs continue to decrease, we'd be needing less and less. Medicare\Medicaid is already $1T, so you'd get rid of that all together, meaning we have to theoretically close a $1T gap (or less). The military would make up a large part of that--focus on saving lives instead of taking them--and higher taxes to cover the rest: five percent uncapped payroll tax.
It's easily doable, and the cost savings would be tremendous after a decade. We'd see a spike and possibly run a debt the first few years as people seek the care they need, but once we have healthy people running around not having to worry about getting sick or going bankrupt because of it, you'd see costs drop dramatically. It's pretty much what's predicted if we actually get a single-payer healthcare system.
But that's not going happen because "death panels" and "gub'mint gonna kill granny" and whatever other non-sense the Party of No can dream up.
Belarus has over twice as many - 4.55 per 1,000 people
Cuba is ranked #2 - 5.91 per 1,000 people - almost THREE TIMES as many physicians per capita as the USA. Which might explain how Cuba can provide more inexpensive health care to more people.
Any massive increase in the number of patients without an increase in trained health care professionals will result in delays, triage and rationing.
So what you are saying is the U.S. system is built upon denying care to a number of people and hoping a large number of people don't seek treatment of any kind. If not, then you won't be providing care to anymore people than you do now - it isn't like the population of the U.S. is going to radically increase because universal health care is now available.
I know this would never happen and I'm not sure how financially smart it would be for the nation, but what if we ended Medicare/Medicaid and had Universal Health Care instead? How would that play out?
-This is just for entertainment of course; so lets attempt to keep over-baring negativity out of this.
So let the discussions begin!
You'd come out in the black. At least if you threw in the other, smaller government health programs like VHA, IH, childrens etc.
At the moment, about 1/3 of the American people is on government health care, from memory. However, these are by far the most expensive people, medically. Medicare includes the old, who cost far more than the young, and everyone on medicaid is ill. The remaining 2/3s, who are working and paying for this would on the average be far cheaper to cover.
Also, doing all these separate systems means there is a lot of gatekeeping and duplicated work, as well as a lot of knock-on bureaucracy down the line to cover billing and liasing with different systems.
Currently, the US taxpayer pays more in tax, per person and as a % of GDP for government healthcare than the average UHC European:
Source: Wall Street Journal
The pink bar is private spending. The red one is public -from taxes. Notice how Americans pay more in taxes for government health care than Canadians or most Europeans?
Theres not a lot of areas where economic theory works out in the real world, but one point where basic economics and the real world is in perfect harmony is single payer being massivly more efficient than the present US model ( "massivly" in this case means "the US wastes an amount of money equal to twice its military budget in the health care sector each year")
The US has the economics of size going for it, and still spend more than twice what UHC costs, in terms of % of GDP or $ per person, with no better results. (Often significantly worse)
I don't necessarily support ObamaCare and that's why I'd rather take Universal Health Care over ObamaCare. Yes, plenty of physicians, nurses, etc will need to be hired because of increase demand on our hospitals nation wide but is that necessarily a bad thing? Regardless the amount of physicians will need to be increased dramatically because of the Baby Boomers retiring.
I too think a Universal Health Care system would be better than Obamacare.
I'm actually surprised how many people support what I proposed, especially on this site. I wouldn't mind having a tax-increase (which I'm going to get under ObamaCare) if I actually get a benefit from it. Medicare is already costing us nearly $1 trillion annually, so us eliminating that and putting it towards a UHS would keep everything efficient. Of course hospital expansions will be need nation wide and different sectors of the hospital will be need to be built to provide more efficient health care such as more children hospitals, larger emergency rooms, and etc. Really it's doing just as the military has done, create plenty of jobs through contracting, imagine how much new supplies will need to be purchased, how many new helicopters will be bought, how many new construction jobs will made from all of this expansion, and etc. And the best part is we're all covered instead of a select few!
Of course with our government, a capitalistic spin would create error in the system. I'm sure they'd allow the wealthier to pay a few thousand to cut places for certain procedures.
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