151–160 of 407 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, I know and that's why I am still paying. But seriously, we are paying for emergencies, this should be stated when paying for the insurance. Second, why were the costs $150000?
It’s right in the name. It’s called Insurance, not Healthcare as a Service.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's what I've never understood about the arguments against single payer: >You can't pick your own doctor I already can't. If they're in network, I'm good, but if they're out of network - like my doctor was - then I have to find a new one. >You can't pick your treatments My spouse was denied medication by an insurance company because it was too new. So. >You don't get to have all the healthcare you want I already h…
I know it's an edge case, but there was that kid in the UK with an easily fixable, but fatal, heart condition. Their health association refused to pay for it because no doctors in the UK knew how to perform the surgery, and they weren't willing to pay for them fly to the USA where there were specialists who could do the surgery. After they started a GoFundMe to pay for the surgery themselves, and there was a lot of p…
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…
We would save money. Why does it matter if that money is spent publicly vs privately?
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…
> less incentive to investigate fraud From the paper: "In addition to savings on overheads, a comprehensive database of health-care charges would facilitate detection of fraud, which extracts $85·7 billion every year. Following the transition to a single-payer system in Taiwan, an 8% reduction in overall national expenditure was attributed to the reduction in fraud. By moving from a fragmented health-care payment sys…
I just wanted to emphasize this point from your quote:
>funding for early retirement options, extensive severance, retraining programmes, and relocation expenses for all workers in these sectors. Implementation of such a plan is estimated to... a sum which would be recouped within the first year by the health-care savings estimated here."
Even if we provided a generous 2 years of severance for people to transition into other roles, we still save in the long term.
My neighbor, a colorectal surgeon and very into what he does, has remarked on several occasions that if single payer ever happens, he and most of the other surgeons he knows will likely walk away from the profession very shortly thereafter. There would be no financial or professional motivation to continue practicing.
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 net savings would be $450B, but the total cost would still be in the 10s of trillions of dollars" US health care spending for 2018 alone was $3.65 trillion. 10 years of that sort of spending would result in $36.5 trillion. So we're already talking tens of trillions of dollars, even if nothing changes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was in the hospital over Christmas because of a very severe infection. I was there for 2 weeks, and am lucky to be alive. The costs were over $150k, but I ended up paying $1500 in various deductibles to Kaiser, etc. I was happy to pay $1500 and am alive because of the care that I got. I pay about $6000 a year in medical insurance per year through my employer and it ended up being totally worth it. Not a few weeks p…
$6000/year sounds very low for healthcare in the U.S. When you say "I pay" are you really only counting the employee contribution? For purposes of analyzing aggregate healthcare costs for a whole country, we ought to be using combined employee+employer costs (W2 DD) and not just the (usually small) employee portion highlighted by HR at benefits season.
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…
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…
I have a family friend who lost his job, lost his insurance and couldn't afford to take his meds which would have prevented the massive stroke that paralyzed him 3 weeks later.
This was 10 years ago and his rehabilitation is still ongoing. His wife can't work and is his full-time caretaker. Multiple lives destroyed because we as a society can't get a system together where it makes rational sense to provide this man with the couple cents worth of pills that would have prevented this calamity.
It's the same story with every other chronic disease and health care issue - just massive amounts of human suffering that could be avoided.
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…
Likewise, total billing and insurance related (BIR) administrative costs are ~$500 billion.[2] (Year unknown.) Or roughly 15% of total healthcare expenditures. And that's up from $471 billion in 2012[3], even though the ACA capped insurance provider administrative overhead and instituted many other reforms intended to address these costs.
Plus, it's odd that people on both the left and the right who are convinced that lobbyists control Washington will simultaneously hold the notion in their head that either a public option or single-payer would be able to consistently cap reimbursements and contain costs. If they're right then it's a miracle Medicare and Medicaid do as it as much as they do, and impossible for it to do so once the Federal government is directly reimbursing the majority of healthcare expenditures. Indeed, if it were possible then defense expenditures would be more efficient and a fraction of what they currently are.
These rosy estimates are ridiculous. We have over 10 years of direct experience with substantial and serious healthcare reform. Obamacare attempted and does enact a variant of almost every concrete reform imaginable. Whatever you think of Obamacare, you can't deny that it has provided mountains of empirical data about the difficulties and promises of containing costs. And yet Obamacare opponents on both sides--those who want to return to the pre-Obamacare system, and those who want a public option or single-payer--willfully ignore the evidence, unchastened by reality.
A California congressional committee looked at the potential costs for single-payer in the state and it would have required an additional $200 billion/year in tax revenue even after accounting for diverting existing private and Federal expenditures. That's what a cold, hard, realistic examination of the facts looks like even by those predisposed to enacting it. Maybe that $200 billion would be worth it; from a moral perspective it certainly seems so. But to deny the costs is to invite failure and financial ruin as not even a majority of Californians, let alone Americans, are willing to make that sacrifice.
We need to figure out how to better solve the cost problems before we continue to wade further into the waters. Otherwise we're just going to drown. If you look at all the other healthcare systems around the world with both better outcomes and lesser costs, neither single-payer nor a public option are defining characteristics. Rather, they run the gamut from mostly private to mostly public. It we can't lower costs with Obamacare, which has both substantial public and private components (and thus opportunities for exploring structural efficiencies across the spectrum), switching to single-payer or a public option won't move the needle.
[1] https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Sta...
[2] https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/healthcare/reports/2...