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Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study

ysph.yale.edu

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Re: Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study

#161

Post by cindyllm »

al_borland wrote: post #122
solaarphunk wrote: post #19

What about quality of care tradeoffs? In Canada, for example, you are forced to use the government system, and if it doesn't deem you important enough, there is no private option.

My dad, in the US on Medicare (one of the government funded systems), was denied a test. Because we have the option and had the money, he went and got the test himself on his own dime. That kicked off a series of events that led to a quadruple bypass, avoided an impending heart attack, and likely added many years to his life and his ability to remain and functioning member of society. While I love the idea of never h…

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Re: Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study

#162

Post by iAMkenough »

jvanderbot wrote: post #21

We've been down this road. ACA was predicated on studies like this, to no avail (it turns out that intense opposition chips away at it over time regardless of these studies). I'm of the opinion that, if your solution requires perpetual majority control of legislative, executive, and judicial branches, your solution is in fact a campaign slogan. I'm not saying that this is what is happening now , but I am saying that…

> If your solution requires perpetual majority control of legislative, executive, and judicial branches, your solution is in fact a campaign slogan.

Describes everything the GOP offers as “solutions.” Theirs tend to strip rights while Democrats tend to provide rights.

We’re still waiting on the GOP’s “concepts of a plan” for healthcare promised on the last campaign trail.

Re: Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study

#164

Post by th0raway »

Most of the problems of the US system aren't really a matter of who pays, but the fact that so much is paid for services, at every level. Any really significant savings, cutting bureaucracy and pressuring providers to make costs resemble those of other developed countries, are taking money out of someone's pocket. Many hundreds of thousands of them, if not millions. This makes any significant reform very difficult, as those people vote, and will know exactly who made them worse off, even if the country in general was made much better off.

Read The Logic of Collective Action by Mancur Olsen. It wasn't written thinking of healthcare. but anyone looking at the US healthcare system will see that what is going on is stacks upon stacks of collective action beating overall societal efficiency, over and over and over again, in such a way that it's basically in none of the decision makers best interest to actually increase overall efficiency.

Re: Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study

#165

Post by epistasis »

strictnein wrote: post #131
epistasis wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ACA has saved tons of lives. Due to the intense opposition, it was not structured in a way that could save money, but rather structured in the way that it could get through congress. Additionally, as somebody who was around pre-ACA, I can not tell you how much better, in every single way, the post-ACA healthcare world is. Pre-existing conditions? Access to healthcare as an individual? These are life-changing possibil…

> ACA has saved tons of lives It was the Medicaid expansion that has been cited as saving lives [0]. An expansion that has almost nothing to do with the rest of the ACA. > "There's a very clear type of fallacy you are engaging ... There's no intellectual rigor or honesty in that sort of thinking" So you're claiming that the person who posted that is not only falling into a fallacy, but they are neither intellectually…

> An expansion that has almost nothing to do with the rest of the ACA.

That's a very strange assertion, it's literally "the ACA medicaid expansion" and was a key part of the whole thing.

I'm saying most political argumentation is dishonest and not intellectually rigorous, and that's what the comment was doing. It wasn't arguing based on facts or data or actual specifics, but rather according to vague political ideologies.

That's one reason that I believe politics are discouraged on HN. It turns off our brains and we start using less interesting or useful ways of thinking.

Re: Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study

#166

Post by no-name-here »

loeg wrote: post #81
cityofdelusion wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Private health insurance would still exist alongside for the more wealthy (including nearly everyone on HN) that doesn’t want to wait a year for their public system MRI. Same thing that plays out in other countries. The U.S. already has a form of this in so-called concierge / premium providers too. Lots of profit to be made.

If private health insurance was allowed, UHC would be stillborn. It only works if providers don't have better options than medicare reimbursement rates.

> It only works if providers don't have better options than medicare reimbursement rates.

1. A number of other developed countries have UHC while also allowing a private system as well - what is unique about the US that other countries' existing approach couldn't work here?

2. Less importantly, in this world where everyone has medicare, but a smaller fraction have private coverage, your argument is that the existing healthcare providers would choose to give up most of their (medicare) patients? If so, why wouldn't providers choose to stop serving medicare patients under the pre-2026 system, where giving up medicare patients would be a far smaller loss than in a world where everyone has medicare?

Re: Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study

#167

Post by dpkirchner »

nxm wrote: post #73
otterley wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is frequently true in the USA as well. My provider's dermatology department is pretty backed up and couldn't make me an appointment for an excision until November. Fortunately it's not urgent.

Do you have any more evidence than this anecdote - pretty much any specialist is available this week in my area. Did you check ZocDoc?

Are all of those specialists "in-network"? Have you tried contacting them to see if they truly have availability? It's common for providers (or the insurance carrier), at least in my area, to claim they take new patients when in fact they do not.

(For those not in the know, out of network means costs to the patient are much higher).

Re: Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study

#168

Post by whimsicalism »

googaar wrote: post #159
consensus1 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody, including congress, gives a rat's ass about insurance companies and their profits. The truth is that someone has to approve or deny healthcare. Every universal system does it too, but by government policy instead of corporate decision. After the CEO of United Healthcare was gunned down in the streets for doing that thankless job do you think congress is saying to themselves "hey, maybe we should get into that…

Man I wish I could downvote a comment. This is what you’d see on Reddit. “Thankless job” is a crazy way to describe United Healthcare. No one cares about insurance companies and their profits?? This doesn’t even make sense, so many people rely on insurance and many stakeholders profit off the American insurance system.

You would never see content like that on Reddit as it is far outside of the political valence there.

Re: Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study

#169

Post by giantg2 »

_heimdall wrote: post #64
jvanderbot wrote: post #21

We've been down this road. ACA was predicated on studies like this, to no avail (it turns out that intense opposition chips away at it over time regardless of these studies). I'm of the opinion that, if your solution requires perpetual majority control of legislative, executive, and judicial branches, your solution is in fact a campaign slogan. I'm not saying that this is what is happening now , but I am saying that…

These types of studies, and the goals they aim to support, always frustrate me as solving a surface-level problem rather than root cause. The problem with US healthcare isn't who pays for it, its how damn expensive it is. As always there are multiple factors at play, my list would include corruption, lack of legal accountability/responsibility, and a population that is much less healthy than reasonable. Go after any…

"The problem with US healthcare isn't who pays for it, its how damn expensive it is."

And also how much is required. I bet a study investigating how much money and lives could be saved by reducing obesity would have 2x numbers

Re: Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study

#170

Post by gryfft »

I wonder how many people would be on board for a program to make Medicare available for free for households making over $100,000 annually with 1-3 children.

We're talking about families that are provably not lazy or sucking up handouts: taxpaying citizens with beautiful, healthy children. The job creators and professionals driving America, securing their future and their children's future.

If the government were to focus on these first-class citizens, who knows what could be accomplished once the drag is taken off the system of the useless eaters and the welfare queens.

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