If this were at all true, now read it like the big wig or law maker holding the on/off lever who’s eyes see “Universal Health Coversge Could reduce $1T in available/taxable income”.
Did you notice the gorilla walk by? They sure didn’t.
Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study
481–490 of 1001 posts
Re: Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study
#482Most 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.
I think it’s because Americans been taught that were democracy, not a federal system, but that’s exactly where we expect to do these kinds of reforms. The federal government could reasonably set certain regulatory requirements. The states would need to make sure that any provider within it conforms to the federal levels, you know like auto manufacturing and exhaust emissions. Seems doable. Unfortunately we’re gonna have to wait for the boomers to die because they’re the ones that have gotten theirs and they’ve screw everyone else. Also, unfortunately, the millennials are gonna have to take it on the chin like we have for so much else and realize there is going to be some lost jobs.
Re: Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
I got my urology referral last week and had an appointment this morning...
Lucky you. Maybe they had a last-minute cancellation, or you live in an area in which supply of urologists exceeds demand.
Yeah, I think we have a lack in our area. Years ago when I had a kidney stone, the L3 Trauma Center hospital a few minutes from me had to load me up on dilaudid and ship me from their ER across town via ambulance.
Re: Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study
#484Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, it will, but think about the supply side. If people spend $1T less on health, health professionals will earn $1T less, it means, as GP said, layoffs, cutting salaries, etc... Not just doctors and nurses but also drug researchers, medical equipment manufacturers, etc... These people will now have to do the "something else" that will be spent on, let's say gardening. But you don't turn a nurse into a gardener just…
I don't understand why we always pay attention to only the jobs side of decisions like this. Why is the main concern always preserving existing jobs? The extreme version of that is obviously silly. The savings is real and lowers prices, increasing social mobility and spending elsewhere. How many people are locked out of moving for a job that matches them better, or taking some training for a better job and so on just…
I am not saying it is a bad thing. What I am saying is that when we are talking about trillions we are talking big changes, and big change doesn't come without suffering, and people don't like suffering.
Usually big change doesn't happen without a catastrophic event, like a war, a coup, or an economic crisis, or maybe more optimistically, a technical or scientific breakthrough. So when an article mentions trillions without hinting at such an event, to me, it is incomplete, or wrong.
The French revolution would be an extreme example. It is a win for freedom and democracy, but the period following it is called "the reign of terror", for good reasons.
Re: Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study
#485We'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…
My favorite part of the ACA is that the nickname, Obamacare, was created by Republicans, thinking it would fail and the nickname would make that failure stick to Obama better. Problem was, the ACA helped a lot of people, particularly people in red areas. So, then Republicans started complaining that Obama and the Democrats were being arrogant for putting Obama's name on the ACA.
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Re: Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study
#486The thing studies like this never take into account is the degree to which all of these administrative jobs are corporate welfare. The inefficiency means a lot of people get a regular paycheck for work that is ultimately nonproductive. If you kill off those jobs by eliminating waste there will be millions of people looking for a new job. But the bigger problem is the current system is really profitable for the millio…
Administration is ~25% of provider expense; billing and insurance is ~8.5% of provider expense. Administration is: * Billing and claims management * Compliance * Customer service * Operations * IT You can drive billing all the way down to zero and you're still going to be spending a lot of money on administration just like any large enterprise does. Those jobs aren't really "corporate welfare" and they exist in every…
That ~25% is compounded at every step of the way. 25% of your doctor's office. 25% of the insurance company. Plus don't forget the brokers, which are almost all overhead effectively. 25% of pharmacy. 25% of drug companies.
The people providing actual healthcare end up being a minority in the system.
Re: Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study
#487Earlier quoted context omitted.
Administration is ~25% of provider expense; billing and insurance is ~8.5% of provider expense. Administration is: * Billing and claims management * Compliance * Customer service * Operations * IT You can drive billing all the way down to zero and you're still going to be spending a lot of money on administration just like any large enterprise does. Those jobs aren't really "corporate welfare" and they exist in every…
That ~25% is compounded at every step of the way. 25% of your doctor's office. 25% of the insurance company. Plus don't forget the brokers, which are almost all overhead effectively. 25% of pharmacy. 25% of drug companies. The people providing actual healthcare end up being a minority in the system.
No, insurance spending is broken out separately in the NHE.
Re: Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study
#488I 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?
precisely.
Re: Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study
#489In a more sane world the Republican Party would be in favor of universal health coverage. How many potential entrepreneurs stay working at BigCorp because they need the health benefits? How many small businesses are crushed by the cost of providing healthcare to their employees? It would be great for business to remove any involvement they have in personal healthcare. But I suppose they are the party of big business,…
The Republican party is not a Conservative party, its a Reactionist party of capital, so generally anything that threatens the interests of capital will be absolutely crushed.
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Re: Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study
#490Earlier quoted context omitted.
And then more and more providers would opt out of taking Medicare at all, so we would quickly end up back where we started.
No, you just make it compulsory to accept Medicare. Actually I thought that was already the case.
The "just" is doing some heavy lifting there. Clinicians aren't required to participate in Medicare; in fact they have to go through a complex process in order to join. And there's no way that such a mandate could ever pass Congress, or be effectively enforced. Let's focus on reforms that are actually achievable in the real world.
https://www.cms.gov/medicare/enrollment-renewal/providers-su...