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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

#521

Post by 6510 »

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #514
brandonb wrote: post #113

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…

Why is the United States the only country on Earth where free healthcare doesn't work?

People wouldn't be externalities if healthcare costs money. Next thing you know you would have to pay attention to the environment or god forbid the food. It would eat away the budget for overthrowing countries and bombing children. Watch them elect a democrat to do the bombing next round and a new republican after that. It sounds like a joke but it isn't funny.

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

#522

Post by SpaceNoodled »

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #514
brandonb wrote: post #113

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…

Why is the United States the only country on Earth where free healthcare doesn't work?

Good old American Exceptionalism.

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

#523

Post by SpaceNoodled »

roncesvalles wrote: post #427
GuB-42 wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I consider big numbers like this to be red flags. The GDP of the US is $32T. Saving $1T will essentially make 3% of the US economy vanish. You don't vanish 3% of an economy without wide ranging repercussion, it would be a crisis similar in scale to that of 2008. With such numbers we are not "saving money", these are about rebuilding an entire economy, a painful process. So either the effect will be much smaller…

This is broken window fallacy. The $1T not wasted on healthcare inefficiencies would be spent/invested on other things, creating jobs there. Yes, there would be churn because a good number of people involved in the bureaucracy of private health insurance would lose their job and possibly their career. But these things get smoothed out. Social supports (should) exist to dampen the effects of such churn and keep the ec…

At least the laid-off workers would have healthcare.

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

#524

Post by SpaceNoodled »

GuB-42 wrote: post #484
chermi wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Americans are already suffering under the broken healthcare system. Overall suffering would decrease as a result.

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

#525

Post by bean469 »

dsr_ wrote: post #14
jonplackett wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$1 trillion less profit.

$1 trillion more efficient in allocation of resources, freeing up money for consumer spending on everything.

As long as that does not translate to good short-term profit, the shareholders won't budge

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

#526

Post by bean469 »

johndevor wrote: post #190
GolfPopper wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government does not have the peverse incentive of putting private profit above all other concerns.

The government is just corrupt politicians and lobbyists. You're fighting to give them more money and power.

Sounds like a Ron Swanson quote

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

#527

Post by AuthAuth »

scoofy wrote: post #501
brandonb wrote: post #113

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…

There is a ton of ideology baked into naive-level analysis of this stuff. I am constantly told how much less Europeans pay for better health outcomes and all I can think about was the obesity crisis I grew up around in Texas. Socializing healthcare isn’t going to get an huge portion of the population out of their cars and get them walking as a primary or secondary mode of transportation. Not when it’s 100° and the gr…

>Socializing healthcare isn’t going to get an huge portion of the population out of their cars and get them walking as a primary or secondary mode of transportation

You would think so but once healthcare cost becomes a government policy issue people complain about its spending and they are forced to try and bring that cost down. One of the ways they did that in my country was to promote biking to work and build bike ways.

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

#528

Post by bean469 »

skuzye wrote: post #32
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.

Same here in the UK. If you need to see a specialist, you regularly have to wait months, assuming you can even get a referral in the first place.

That is absolutely the case for many private healthcare providers as well. It depends on where you are and what care you need

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

#529

Post by entropicdrifter »

bell-cot wrote: post #360
nullocator wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hospitals have an operating margin of 2-5% Very curious where this comes from and how accurate it is. For example the $37 a provider charges for an Aspirin seems like more than 2-5% margin.

Hand-waving numerous details, but - That $37 isn't the price in the hospital's gift shop. It's n=1 pricing, hand delivered to your bedside by a nurse with a whole hierarchy of higher-level medical & admin staff behind her, and documented out the wazoo. Aspirin could be free & unlimited at the hospital pharmacy's receiving dock, and it wouldn't affect the @bedside price.

... and in other countries, medical administrative costs are far lower because they don't need to build entire divisions around correctly coding the same condition and procedure 11 different times before insurance approves it, because the insurance is universal and self-consistent by comparison to our private fractured mess.

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

#530

Post by saghm »

dominotw wrote: post #496
saghm wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of society also doesn't require paying for indirectly via employer subsidy (driving up the cost to people who are between jobs or have money by other means). If your objection is to a system that operates differently than the rest of society, it's not clear why the hypothetical healthcare system is more of a bugbear than the very real one that doesn't resemble pretty much any other way that things get purchased.…

i think you are talking over me with some irrelevant nonsense. did you reflect on why you are being downvoted?

From my perspective, what you're saying sounds like nonsense. I'm not sure why you're more concerned with my karma than I am, but since you're curious: no, I did not spend much time thinking about the one singular downvote my comment received. It's pretty common for people to downvote for any number of reasons (downvoting for disagreement in particular is controversial but not against the HN guidelines), so I didn't really read into it at all. Sometimes a comment I make that receives a downvote will end up with upvotes a few days later, and sometimes it won't; sometimes a comment I make that initially receives some upvotes will end up neutral or worse. At the end of the day, I comment because I have something to say, and while others' opinions on that is potentially useful feedback, and a single upvote or downvote is literally the smallest possible signal that can exist about whether what I said has merit.
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