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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

#371

Post by refurb »

leetcrew wrote: post #350
mrep wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My max out of pocket spending is $2,600 a year and I can put $3,500 pretax money into my HSA every year which I do. What I am supposed to worried about?

I have a similar plan and a good income. I am in good health and I make my yearly budget assuming I might have to pay the out of pocket max if I have a health problem. the usual "gotcha" that people mention is going in for a planned procedure and accidentally receiving care from an out-of-network physician. this makes your out of pocket max irrelevant. I've never had this happen to me and I have no idea how often it…

One thing that helps is call your insurance ahead of time to verify the facility and all physicians are in network.

They’ll put a note in your file.

If someone else gets swapped in when your in the table, call back and bitch to them. I’ve had that eliminate the out of network charge.

Is it still a massive pain in the ass we shouldn’t have to deal with? Yes.

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

#372

Post by senordevnyc »

codegeek wrote: post #243
cmollis wrote: post #180

It’s a complete scam run by insurance companies who operate with ostensibly a government mandate (although with seemingly zero oversight). I work for myself and and have historically been paying about 20k per year in premiums for my family with a family deductible which I’ve never gotten remotely close to hitting. I have an hsa which I use to pay for out of pocket expenses pre tax and there is a tax deduction for hea…

I wish i could upvote you 1000 times. Why is it so hard for many people to understand all of this ?

“I stopped paying all the premiums on my car insurance! You wouldn’t believe the savings! Why hasn’t everyone figured out this hack?

Why no, I haven’t had an accident...why do you ask?”

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

#373

Post by senordevnyc »

burkaman wrote: post #72
macinjosh wrote: post #30

I am sure, on paper, it is a brilliant plan. Unfortunately, reality and human behavior almost never follow the plan. Is waste, fraud, and abuse taken into account at all in this study? What about the inevitable changes to consumers' motivation, behavior, and decision making around healthcare? It will change drastically as the cost of their care is even further removed from them than it is now. People who have a procl…

Did you read it? Also, are you familiar with any modern nations where a single-payer healthcare system has been tried? Perhaps we could use them to predict the effects. > Is waste, fraud, and abuse taken into account at all in this study? 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. F…

It doesn’t matter if it’s better. It’s fundamentally impossible to get to there from here directly. You can’t do it politically or economically, and honestly, given how much of our economy is built on healthcare spending, it’s pretty stupid to try. But again, it doesn’t matter, you can’t do it in a democracy. Just like a carbon tax, if you make too much of the population hurt in the short term, they’ll just replace you with someone who won’t.

The public option is the only thing that has a snowballs chance in hell of working.

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

#374

Post by senordevnyc »

partiallypro wrote: post #294

I don't know why the idea of a "public option" fell out of favor with Democrats. It's a good stop along the way, and doesn't risk completely destroying an industry overnight...and therefore has a much higher chance of passing. Eventually employers would push people onto the public option plan, but it wouldn't be overnight. Bernie's plan, imo has so much room for error, it's not even worth considering without a stop a…

100% agree. People are totally delusional to think that there’s a snowball’s chance in hell of single payer happening from where we are. And given that healthcare is like a fifth of the economy, it’s completely reckless anyway! Plus, if nothing else, it’d never get through the Senate, and that’s unlikely to change for decades.

Public option, it’s by far the best path forward.

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

#375

Post by senordevnyc »

codegeek wrote: post #166
mrcu5 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife is a pediatrician and sees about 80% medicaid patients. People absolutely go in more often than they need to because they don't pay a single cent. I'm talking going to the ER because their kid has a cough or is running a fever. These are usually also the most demanding patients.

Medicaid is not the same as Medicare. Medicaid is literally Free stuff so yea, it can be abused. Medicare is not free. People pay into it through taxes. 2 different things.

Free at the point of sale is what’s important. The fact that I know I theoretically pay for it with my taxes does nothing to curb abuse.

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

#376

Post by senordevnyc »

ordinaryradical wrote: post #156
pmoriarty wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

This is the issue. The assumption that it’s somehow better for this to be handled as a consumer expenditure versus a tax is the actual debate.

That’s a very simplistic view. There’s also the question of how those numbers will change over time in each system, and how both care and cost will be distributed.

There’s also the political factor: how would we actually enable this? How do you get it passed? How do you ensure the SC doesn’t strike it down? How do you ensure it’s not just rolled back in 4 years when the presidency flips after the inevitable backlash?

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

#377

Post by asdff »

koolba wrote: post #173
Loughla wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real question, not snarky: Why is this sort of downsizing always wrong for white-collar workers when blue-collar workers have been dealing with it for decades?

There’s a huge difference between downsizing caused by economic forces of the private sector and downsizing caused by outright elimination of an industry by elected officials.

Sometimes you need the public government to step in and shut down malignant private industries.

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

#378

Post by xmly »

n9 wrote: post #228
xmly wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that what Canada has right now? For US, the real problem is still health cost is too high. The market regulation seems doe not work, at least for this decade.

From what I see about half the cost is the admin overhead and another huge chunk is providers billing very high rates because they end up paying a lot less to the insurance companies. If you want to optimize the lowest fruit is the admin overhead, which means just go single payer.

For admin overhead, my understanding is that each insurance firm has its own standard and processing protocols, which brings a huge burden to providers.

The simple solution is having a simple and shared standard enforced by law.

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

#379

Post by csnover »

TurkishPoptart wrote: post #273
paulirwin wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure I'm not 100% accurate on the numbers here because I don't feel like finding the receipts, but close enough. Here's another anecdote from the US. My dog has a pulmonary condition that requires him to take Sildenafil daily (yes, generic Viagra). We got the prescription filled at a local pharmacy for a 90 count, they charged us something around $280 for. We were not expecting that high of a prescription, for a…

Yes, IIRC there was a thread talking about this GoodRX thing. When I was uninsured, it brought the price for a month's supply of generic Singulair from ~$60 to ~$9. Very convenient for me, but where does that money come from? Does GoodRX get paid for that data, that I'm a 30-yo man in x-state who needs x-medicine? Very sketchy.

The money comes from the money that would normally be kicked back to the pharmacy benefit manager[0] as a “rebate” from the pharmaceutical company. The retail prices are jacked up—at least in part—for the benefit of PBMs to extract money from the system[1]. My understanding is that GoodRX gets the negotiated “discount” price from a PBM like every other insurer and then makes a profit from the kickback.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmacy_benefit_management

[1] https://armandalegshow.com/episode/why-are-drug-prices-so-ra...

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

#380

Post by burnte »

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.

Considering how many other industrialized nations have it, we'd have to try incredibly hard to get it wrong. Plus, it's not like we can't make changes later.

Plus we already have Medicare, and do that pretty well.

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