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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

#231

Post by newguy1234 »

n9 wrote: post #221
Ghjklov wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think they'll give me free health insurance as a 23 year old who lives with a parent? I don't have any interest paying a dime for health insurance because I could use that money to eat healthily instead and try to stay out of trouble. Otherwise, I'd starve or sacrifice my diet in order to afford the health insurance. It has never made sense to me.

You are risking bankrupting you and your parents for a single hospital visit. Friend had a heart arrhythmia scare at 28 years old. Lost consciousness, ambulance to ER, admitted and then stayed in hospital for three days. $67k in Billings that they negotiated down to about $50k. That’s why.

But the kicker with this is most young people don't have much in assets so they don't lose much in a bankruptcy. Meanwhile they get to immediately spend any cash they would otherwise be paying on health insurance. Also from what I've read...the lack of insurance penalty has been scrapped. Now it makes sense why so many don't get the insurance.

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

#232

Post by newguy1234 »

dx87 wrote: post #35
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....

If you're willing to gamble on your health, it's still much cheaper to pay the fine than pay for healthcare that isn't through an employer. When I was unemployed for a few months a couple of years ago, I opted to not get any healthcare coverage from the state exchange while I was looking for work because it was going to be over $1000 a month to cover my wife and I, plus it only covered a percentage of healthcare cost…

They scrapped the fine as of 2019.

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

#233

Post by fernandotakai »

codegeek wrote: post #143
fernandotakai wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but... why? i mean, if i can afford it, i would want private health care because it's usually less crowded and you can have stuff done a lot faster. for example: a friend of mine had to wait 6mo to do a vasectomy through our public health care system. another friend waited 2w to do his (through private health care) if you could afford it, wouldn't it be better to pay for it? for me (and maybe i'm completely in the wr…

You are confusing Private Health "Care" wth Private Health "Insurance". The issue with Private health Insurance in US is that they have too much power and strong hold on doctors/hospitals etc and for them to make profits, EVERYTHIng is priced too high, EVERYTHING. So private health "insurance" has to die for this to be effective. They can exist only for supplemental stuff. No one is talking about taking away private…

i'm not! where i live, we have public health insurance and private health insurance (if you don't know, wikipedia has a good summary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sistema_%C3%9Anico_de_Sa%C3%BA...).

i can go to a public hospital and get most procedures done -- the problem is, a lot of them, specially electives, take a LONG time (sometimes, over a year). but i can do them, and i'm not going to get bankrupt if i get bitten by a snake.

but i also have private health insurance -- i pay it myself for me and my wife. why? because sometimes, i don't wanna get into insane lines and wait for hours on ER. also, i can get elective procedures done a lot faster -- which means i'm not crowding our public health care system.

what i mean is: everything i can do with my public heath insurance system i can also do with my private health care system. it's just a matter of how fast it is.

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

#234

Post by newguy1234 »

ar-nelson wrote: post #29
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....

When I was working as a software development contractor, I went without health insurance for a year. I'm young and I don't have any medical problems, so I could get away with this. Because I'm a software developer and I make decent money, I didn't qualify for any tax credits or discounts. The cheapest health insurance plan that I could find cost twice as much as just paying both the ACA penalty and the Massachusetts…

That may work but only if you don't have any significant assets. If you do then you risk getting a massive medical bill and then the hospital will go after all your assets.

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

#235

Post by api »

The fact that it would save money may be part of the problem. The massive and very redundant health insurance bureaucracy employs a lot of people.

In the realm of government contracting and large scale policy decisions like this, efficiency is often politically inconvenient since it means jobs may be lost.

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

#236

Post by Barrin92 »

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…

>From what I have been told by healthcare professionals, medicare has less incentive to negotiate cost, less incentive to investigate fraud, and therefore lower administrative cost.

I don't think that's more likely to explain the cost saving than the sheer scale advantages of having a unified bureaucracy rather than countless of small insurance agents.

I will dig the source out when I'm home but (I think it was Paul Krugman) who went over the administrative overhead in one of his blog posts. Medicare and Medicaid both have administrative costs of less than 1% of their budget, the private industry clocks in at more than 15-18% IIRC. I have trouble believing that this is mainly fraud detection considering that it's consistent across other countries with consolidated healthcare sectors.

A single large administration can simply streamline these processes better than thousands of individual companies. To be frank the insurance industry seems mostly like an employment program for the middle class white collar sector.

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

#238

Post by elihu »

beat wrote: post #149
onemoresoop wrote: post #79

I'm paying nearly 20k (parents+child) on insurance I don't have time to use (and luckily no serious need) and once my son went to see his pediatrician and our 'private' insurance company (that i'm not going to name) sent us bill of $500, for a check-up. We disputed the charge with the insurance and they agreed to wave the payment next month. Next month comes and guess what? The same letter comes in mail. We disputed…

This is where I think political leaders (Democrat or Republican) could do really well. It's not just making sure people are covered. It's the existential dread of dealing with opaque, unpredictable, and incomprehensible bureaucracy that can make life-and-death decisions or drop financially crippling bills in your lap, even if you have good insurance . The American health care system isn't just bad for the poor. It's…

It's the same thing with taxes: we can debate about what the right level of taxes should be for this person or that, but all the effort and money spent filling out tax returns is pure waste.

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

#239

Post by redler »

chasd00 wrote: post #131
burnte wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in healthcare as a CIO. I interact with all of our billing systems, processes, and departments. Frankly, I think the estimate of a 14% savings due to reduced administration to be low. Single payer would eliminate 30% of non-medical jobs in my company. Teams eliminated or dramatically reduced: * VOB, verification of benefits, they fight with the insurance company just to determine what coverage the patient has,…

i said this in another thread but you're assuming the single paying entity gets it even close to right.

One architectural difference is that the single-paying entity's job would be primarily to pay. The job of the many current entities is to not pay -- and to develop labyrinthine, nondeterministic, unknowable structures of great complexity to that specific end. Payments for care under our for-profit system are actually called "medical loss".

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

#240

Post by lotsofpulp »

onemoresoop wrote: post #79

I'm paying nearly 20k (parents+child) on insurance I don't have time to use (and luckily no serious need) and once my son went to see his pediatrician and our 'private' insurance company (that i'm not going to name) sent us bill of $500, for a check-up. We disputed the charge with the insurance and they agreed to wave the payment next month. Next month comes and guess what? The same letter comes in mail. We disputed…

Why would the insurance company send you a bill? The healthcare provider sends the bill, as they are the party that is owed.
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