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

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

#381
post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Half the population does not vote. This is the problem socialists have- how do you get the underclass to exercise their power against the bourgeois?

No, the problem socialists have is that most people are smart enough to realize they won't be better off under a socialist regime, to the chagrin of the self-selected vanguard.

I'm not sure most people can actually define socialism, let alone recognize it.

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

#382
post #270

[flagged]

The government provides your police force and fire department. Why not?

Look no further than the UK, with 24 month waiting lists, the shunning of experimental treatments (many high profile kill decision cases) and skyrocketing costs.

In the UK, a brain surgeon is paid less than the General Manager of a single Buc-ees Gas Station location in the United States. Absolutely diabolical.

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

#383
post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if universal health coverage lost money it would be better than the current system that is based on a "causing cancer is better for the GDP than curing it" mentality.

The US has top-tier cancer survival-after-diagnosis outcomes. We spend too much to get there, and other countries in our cohort would "argue" that we get those numbers in part by diagnosing earlier and that our outcomes are broadly similar, but if you're going into these debates with "the US private health care system causes cancer deaths", that's a pretty rebuttable argument.

This is a cherry picked statistic. We still have lower life expectancy, high infant mortality rates, and one of the highest rate of preventable and treatable deaths among developed countries

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

#384

I don't want it. I don't want to pay for it either. anything the fed government does is utter crap.

That's basically my concern, too. If we had a "Medicare for all" system, would it end up like Social Security, a system that started out with great intentions, but has since ballooned into an expensive, bureaucratic nightmare?

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

#385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we could have just expanded Medicaid Laws need votes. If we are going to be unbound by reality then we could "just" put a medbed to cure all diseases, reverse ageing, and regrow limbs using quantum space-age tech in everyone's home.

Too many people think snark is a substitute for insight. The major GOP complaint about the entire thing was that it was the federal government forcing people to buy a product from companies. The Supreme Court ruled that it had that power.

The ACA was the Republican plan until championed by Obama. The Republican goal was to say anything to denigrate their own plan. Romney later became the nominee for President and it was his plan that the ACA was largely based off of.

Republicans fought hard to discredit their own plan. They just wanted to move to the right of whatever it was that the black man championed.

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

#386
post #87

Who's gonna tell the doctors and nurses that they get a 50% pay cut?

You think they’re getting so much money from out current system that cutting out insurance companies would result in a 50% reduction in their pay? Have you ever looked up the size of the health insurance sector here?

You're being dishonest if you claim otherwise. UK brain surgeons get paid less than a Walmart general manager in the United States, let alone a like for like comparison.

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

#387

I'd like to believe this, but the study makes a bunch of really hasty assumptions. The authors derive the $1T number from $1.3T in total cost savings and $304B in incremental spend (incremental spend is due to insuring more people). The $1.3T in cost savings come from five big buckets: lower pharmaceutical prices, Medicare-level payments to providers, reduced administrative overhead, less fraudulent billing, and fewe…

> Hospitals have an operating margin of 2-5%

I don't spend any healthcare money at the hospital. It's all all providers office, private clinic, etc.

It costs $300 for my primary care doctor to see me for about 7 minutes. An assistant takes my blood pressure, he asks me a few questions about my habits and diet, and then I come back next year.

If I actually need any services, I go to much more expensive specialist, or urgent care facility. A visit there is about $100 and then a couple bucks for whatever prescription they give me.

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

#388
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can someone tell me this. Right now level of care is rationed by type of insurance you can afford. eg: northwestern in chicago downtown is inaccesible to ppl below certain income level. In universal everyone has access to every hospital ? Why would someone go to lower level hospital if they can go to northwestern. Now the acess to best hosptials is gated by a queue? I am not saying this is right but ppl who already h…

> Now the acess to best hosptials is gated by a queue? I mean, yes? Literally the same principle we all learned in kindergarten for how to make access to something fair. You didn't get to skip the line in lunch because your parents had a better job than someone else either.

Sadly, this is a better comparison than you probably intended, because access to school lunch is still not universal in the US.

If a child cannot pay, there are some districts that serve cheaper alternative meals that don't meet the normal lunch standards, some that shame children by giving them hand stamps, and even some that will literally dump their tray in the trash.

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

#389

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.

I suspect Social Security would have met that definition at one point in time. Perhaps even paid overtime, the 40-hour work-week, etc.

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

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Part of the reason why there is no effort to fix this, to keep you a slave to a job that provides healthcare. Imagine the reduction in labor supply and increase in labor costs if healthcare did not require employment. On can, in many cases (facts intensive), bail to a developed country with healthcare if you want to realize this dream earlier than whenever the US will achieve the outcome (and your life situation supp…

That's not how this system came into being. It's a path-dependent quirk of the tax codes of the 1940s. We got into this predicament because of WW2-era wage controls (a dollar spent on health care by your employer was literally worth more than a dollar in wages).

This is one major reason why most of the world's universal systems make private insurance work, and it doesn't blow up the way ours does. But I don't think employers are any happier about it than you are!

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