121–130 of 206 posts
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"Or is the US government not a leading force in fighting corruption anymore?" Um...
Put it in perspective (compared with every country on Earth). https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_percept...
It's still absurd to me that we make the false differentiation between taxes and insurance premiums. If you've got a family, neither is negotiable. If you have a job that pays, I promise you it affects your check in nearly identically the same way as payroll taxes do. There's a tradition in America where the price isn't actually the real price, we artificially advertise fake prices to get you in the door and stuff a…
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This simplification seems disingenuous. Would switching to single payer solve your last sentence / quote from the article? Aka, would putting the US government in the middle make things simpler and more efficient (and cheaper) for the end user (health care patients)? I can't say I'm convinced. Compare with the current system, where any given user is still effectively dealing with a single payer -- their insurance pro…
>I would think that private, competing companies would seek out better deals vs a single government entity who couldn't really negotiate That's the biggest advantage of single payer, one buyer can negotiate better deals with suppliers because there are no other buyers. It's basically a reverse monopoly.
I find it hilarious that this article uses state government taking over road maintenance as an analogy and claim it will save money, while it's known that California has a bad reputation in road repair, due to funding problem. http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-sac-road-funding-prob...
>California’s reliance on gas taxes to repair its transportation network is becoming less and less tenable. Increased fuel economy standards have led to less spending on gasoline
Why stop at saying it's a funding problem? (Allegedly) Obstructionist Republicans won't allow the government to react to changing conditions to update laws needed to fix the funding problem.
How do we compare apples to apples (between countries)? Compare health expenditure per capita (public and private) with multiple health indexes. I.e. get the bang for buck . In the list of nations with the best bang for buck healthcare programs, you will notice that top 20 healthcare programs are mostly single payer. http://www.who.int/healthinfo/paper30.pdf But there are single payer healthcare systems with bad heal…
https://ourworldindata.org/the-link-between-life-expectancy-...
The US is pretty divergent... and not in a good way.
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You can't have a truly free market health care system: https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/25/why-markets-can... http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/82/2/PHCBP.pdf The federal government already pays for 64.3% of healthcare costs http://www.pnhp.org/news/2016/january/government-funds-nearl... . In a centralized managed system this would likely cover the cost of all healthcare. It's roughly what other industrial…
This is what I don't understand. The feds are paying a bunch of money via Medicare/Medicaid/VA but clearly aren't covering everyone. What is the mechanism whereby more people are covered but no additional funds are required? Yes, there's some profit in private insurance companies, but it's not _that_ much.
Our current system is seriously inefficient. Look at how much we spend compared to similar industrialized countries that have single-payer systems. These numbers include the ~13% of the population that didn't have health insurance at the time this chart was created. So we currently pay roughly twice as much to cover 87% of our population. If we had a system similar to Germany we could do it with $600/capita/year in private money added. I would gladly split an additional $50/month in healthcare costs with my employer.
It blows my mind that health is treated differently. It seems to me a lot of middle-America mistakenly assumes it's socialist, which single provider is. Single-payer is similar to most systems we already enjoy. It's the only way prices will come down. You need negotiating leverage and a single-payer system that a majority of your population uses is the only way to have that kind of leverage over drug companies and healthcare providers.
Single payer universal healthcare with more expensive private plans (for those who can afford) is the only system that can come close to fixing the broken healthcare system in this country.
It's still absurd to me that we make the false differentiation between taxes and insurance premiums. If you've got a family, neither is negotiable. If you have a job that pays, I promise you it affects your check in nearly identically the same way as payroll taxes do. There's a tradition in America where the price isn't actually the real price, we artificially advertise fake prices to get you in the door and stuff a…
Whenever I've visited the U.S. this drives me crazy. I always wonder how people shop for anything, given that the only time you find out the actual price of things is when you're about to pay for them. Do you just in your head have to tack on 10 to 20 percent (depending on the context)?
The word "negotiation" is a euphemism here: > The most important source of cost savings under single-payer is that large government entities are able to negotiate much more favorable terms with service providers. If there are no other options for clients, it's essentially the government telling doctors how much their services are worth.
It's not just doctors, its drug and health insurance companies, etc... but really? Is the argument is that we as a nation should pay double what other modern nations pay so doctors can be well paid? Edit: Here's a deal, lets pay for doctor's educations, implement universal healthcare and call it even.
Also, doctors aren't the only thing we should be talking about. That's probably the easiest subject to think about.
It's much, much more difficult to talk about drug and device prices. Should the government dictate how much a new drug or device costs? What are the risks and downsides of doing that?