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Single-payer healthcare would save $450B and 68k lives a year: study

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Re: Single-payer healthcare would save $450B and 68k lives a year: study

#51

Post by bduerst »

markroseman wrote: post #38
jkingsbery wrote: post #11

> "Furthermore, we estimate that ensuring health-care access for all Americans" From many anecdotes I've read about medicine in socialized countries, it's unwise to assume that having insurance is the same as access. Many procedures are made unavailable due to being considered cost effective by The Single Payer, and the wait time for specialists can often be long. Further, what counts as "costs" in US health industry…

Yes, in a properly functioning universal healthcare system, wait times for specialists can be longer for things that are less urgent. First priority is those with the most medical need, not whoever steps up to pay to play.

It's still comparable with the hybrid system in the U.S. too - i.e. outpatient surgery procedures can take months no matter which system.

Re: Single-payer healthcare would save $450B and 68k lives a year: study

#52

Post by ncallaway »

mgraczyk wrote: post #7

In the study, nearly all the computed savings comes from two sources. 1. Decrease in pharmaceutical costs as a result of better bargaining power. 2. Decrease in administrative overhead, calculated by extrapolating the overhead in medicare to the entire US healthcare economy. I don't have an informed opinion on either of these estimates, but my intuition is that #1 seems reasonable while #2 seems unlikely. The justifi…

We do a lot of development work for client's in the medical and medical billing department.

> Decrease in administrative overhead, calculated by extrapolating the overhead in medicare to the entire US healthcare economy.

That doesn't strike me as unlikely at all. Maybe their extrapolation is aggressive, but there are people at nearly every practice who spend a large portion of their day just managing the billing of cases to insurance companies.

The amount of work that goes into billing a case to insurance companies is really insane. It tends to be a very manual process, because every insurance company is different.

Re: Single-payer healthcare would save $450B and 68k lives a year: study

#53

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

Olscore wrote: post #22

Fundamentally, it is disgusting we are forced by government to buy insurance products (e.g., car, health) provided by for-profit companies; however, I do not support universal healthcare either. The government has zero ability to control its expenditure, because the electorate vote themselves benefits. The long-term financial incentives to maintain a functioning society are all broken because of the misaligned short-…

> The government has zero ability to control its expenditure, because the electorate vote themselves benefits.

Could you give me some examples of this? Living in a nation with universal healthcare, I've never seen this.

Re: Single-payer healthcare would save $450B and 68k lives a year: study

#55

Post by ve55 »

I dislike how often I see justifications for the sources of inadequacies of current systems supposedly shown by comparing different countries to the US.

An example of this in the paper is when they state that the US has more expensive healthcare, but yet worse metrics such as life expectancy. As the differences in healthcare systems between the US and these other comparison countries are obvious, they want to clearly imply causation here. But, when comparing one country to another country, you are changing so many variables at once that it doesn't allow you to conclude the source or causality of these differences. They may still be partially right, but it is nowhere near proven.

While the US does have more expensive health care, it also has higher real incomes, which seem to correlate strongly with this (see the first two images on https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/why-conventional-wisdom-o...). While the US does have a worse life expectancy than many 'comparable' countries, it also has significantly worse problems of obesity and drug overdoses, which when controlled for eliminate a large amount of the discrepancy.

Some parts of the paper are definitely reasonable and generally agreed-upon, but it's quite clear they had a specific goal and political call-to-action set in their minds when writing it.

Re: Single-payer healthcare would save $450B and 68k lives a year: study

#56

Post by tropo »

secabeen wrote: post #9
lwb wrote: post #2

Is this Bernie's plan? I know there are subtle but important differences between all the different varieties of "universal healthcare" that exist in the world. The Twitter account @BadEconTakes enumerated something about this in a recent post: https://twitter.com/BadEconTakes/status/1228143455399858176/... Excuse their obvious bias against it; I wonder what the difference in expected savings (money + lives) might be…

The fundamental challenge of any universal health care system is that to cut our spending on health care to the level of other western industrialized countries will take $1 Trillion of annual revenue out of the existing system. There's going to be a lot of disruption and people who need new jobs when that revenue goes to other things in our economy.

Roughly, that is 20 million jobs lost. (assume $50,000 each)

Cutting $1 trillion is a change that affects 5% of GDP.

This issue is part of why Obamacare kept the insurance companies. Killing jobs didn't go over well.

Re: Single-payer healthcare would save $450B and 68k lives a year: study

#57

Post by ameister14 »

bduerst wrote: post #51
markroseman wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, in a properly functioning universal healthcare system, wait times for specialists can be longer for things that are less urgent. First priority is those with the most medical need, not whoever steps up to pay to play.

It's still comparable with the hybrid system in the U.S. too - i.e. outpatient surgery procedures can take months no matter which system.

Perhaps, but I believe the averages are significantly lower in the US - Canada publishes theirs, you can check it.

Re: Single-payer healthcare would save $450B and 68k lives a year: study

#58

Post by nbp160130 »

legitster wrote: post #31

The net savings would be $450B, but the total cost would still be in the 10s of trillions of dollars (Edit: 30-50 over 10 years), bigger than all of our federal spending combined. It's one thing to have as an objective, and another as a plan for getting there. The proposal they cite would make federal healthcare expenditures 69%(!!!) of the GDP (Edit: total federal expenditures). It's simply not realistic to convert…

The "10s of trillions of dollars" estimates you see are for 10 years of projected spending, not for one year.

Re: Single-payer healthcare would save $450B and 68k lives a year: study

#59

Post by bduerst »

markroseman wrote: post #48

That also doesn't factor in the indirect benefits to the economy, like all the people who can't start a new business (etc.), being stuck in jobs they don't want because if they left they'd lose their benefits.

Or the boon from not having one of the highest infant mortality rates in the developed world.

Re: Single-payer healthcare would save $450B and 68k lives a year: study

#60

Post by opencl »

newguy1234 wrote: post #15

What I don't get is how do 37 million Americans not have health insurance when the ACA was suppose to fix that issue? All of the plans are adjusted based on your income level and you get a tax credit if you are low income. If you are very poor then you get free healthcare....

You have to be really poor to get Medicaid in most states. Yes there are relatively cheap subsidized insurance options for people not quite poor enough to get Medicaid but the deductibles are so high that these same people will end up broke before the insurance even starts paying out so they see no point in buying it.
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