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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

#221

Post by SoftTalker »

TimorousBestie wrote: post #197
SoftTalker wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a citation is needed for "Americans regularly avoid care ... because they can’t afford it." I think there are other reasons, e.g. they don't like doctors, or it's too inconvenient, or waiting times are too long. I have good insurance and haven't seen a doctor in probably 20 years. I know people who are visiting the doctor for every sore throat, ache and pain or sneeze and sniffle, and that's not me at all.

Here you go, a recent survey: https://www.jgwentworth.com/resources/medical-emergency > The survey showed that over nine in ten (92%) of insured respondents had delayed or avoided medical care because of concern about cost. > In fact, 95% of those surveyed said a medical emergency would likely put them into serious debt even with insurance.

An unexpected car replacement would put most people into serious debt. And there's no insurance for that.

People get so hung up on the idea that they should have to pay for health care, when you have to pay for every other necessity in life.

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

#222

Post by etchalon »

cactacea wrote: post #210
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…

> These are life-changing possibilities, especially for entrepreneurs. I would quit my day job and completely focus on my side business if I didn't have to worry about healthcare.

I was wondering one day why it seemed like so many YouTubers were Canadian.

The "well of course" moment took me a day longer than it should have.

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

#223

Post by strictnein »

kennywinker wrote: post #173
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.

Having the machine capacity to get non-urgent MRIs in hours is part of why US healthcare is so expensive. Anyway, the average (again for non-urgent MRIs) where I live in canada is 9 weeks, which is i am sure skewed due to the rural population. In the city it’s like half that.

Yep, in the US my wife had to wait a day. She could have gotten it the same day, had her injury been a little worse.

There's this idea that there are no upsides to the American system, only downsides.

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

#224

Post by lettergram »

Ah yes, the claim free money would save lives!

The truth is once systems like this are implemented they change the dynamics of the study and as such could hurting lives.

As a simple example, the biggest cost to the healthcare system in the US is dialysis. Many of those folks already have health issues, and by both dialysis and for all the issues that caused the need for dialysis in the first place is a massive strain. The direct cost of dialysis is $33B annually [1], but indirectly is probably at least another doubling.

Further, the way the government has imposted monopolies in the space already has caused costs to balloon. While making it "universal" could mean the government gets control, and can limit the explosion. It can also could result in weird incentives like Canada, where they're promoting MAID.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8729831/

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

#225

Post by saghm »

czgov wrote: post #149
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…

George Bush Sr. made a deal with Democrats to raise taxes and cut spending. Ever since then the Republican strategy has been to oppose pretty much anything a Democratic President proposes. The ACA was a Republican healthcare idea and they didn’t support it because a Democrat proposed it. There are only two realistic possibilities. Get a Republican to propose some sort of national healthcare or have Democrats fully em…

> There are only two realistic possibilities. Get a Republican to propose some sort of national healthcare or have Democrats fully embrace socialized medicine and not give a shit what Republicans say or think.

It's worth keeping in mind that Eisonhower's cabinet argued against the idea of giving the polio vaccine away for free on the basis of it being a "backdoor to socialized medicine". We're over seven decades past the point where it makes sense to give a shit about what anyone says about "socialized medicine".

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

#226

Post by slibhb »

otterley wrote: post #193
slibhb wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotes aside, here's some data: https://benchmarkcanada.org/Governing_Healthcare-Wait-Times.... The US does far better than the UK and Canada.

That's AI slop published by a think tank, not to be trusted. It's not primary source data.

I'd love to see some other data. But afaik it's basically not contested that the US has shorter wait times than the UK and Canada

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

#227

Post by devindotcom »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #133
karakoram wrote: post #2

>A single-payer universal health care system could cover every American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and still cost $1 trillion less than the system it would replace, according to a new preprint study led by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health.

FWIW, the methodology that produced this particular result is known to have significant issues. The claimed effect disappears after correcting for them. It also isn't the first time that these authors have published similar studies with these issues. They are not a credible source. Universal health coverage may save lives and money but this study doesn't provide actual evidence for it.

"known" by whom, and documented where? if you're going to just parachute in and say this paper by domain experts is dead wrong, at least link to what you believe shows this to be the case.

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

#228

Post by junofan »

th0raway wrote: post #164

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, a…

It’s also geographically distributed. Substantially all congressional districts count a healthcare system as a top-5 employer. Those 70k/yr butts-in-seats admin jobs are occupied by voters, making them difficult to eliminate nationally. You’d have to go down to the state level at least to get anything done.

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

#230

Post by DrScientist »

As I understand it - ~30% of US federal spending is on health care.

In the UK it's about 20%.

Yet apparently the UK is mostly nationalised under the NHS, while in the US there is huge additional spending on private insurance.

Can somebody from the US explain to me how that's the case and why American's still put up with it?

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