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

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671–680 of 1001 posts

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

#671

There aren't enough Physicians, they don't make much and they all seem to be working 12 hour days but being paid a salary that would equate to an 8 hour day. Doctors see downsides of a universal coverage are mostly about loss of autonomy and increased demand because when care becomes free demand rises along with pressure to expand access without extra staff.

Yeah, having lived under universal care, the dark side of it was atrociously long waits to see a specialist and having a GP who is obviously overworked and barely spends any time seeing you.

That may be your experience, and I’m sorry to hear it, but that is not the universal experience.

I’m in the hospital right now. My two year old had her tonsils and adenoids out this morning. Regular Dr visit lead to an X-ray on the same day, specialist appointment 3 weeks later, surgery 2 months later (would have been one month, but we pushed it back because timing and life).

Just talking about how my wife is coming off 18 months of maternity leave. Before that she quit and just didn’t work for 3 years because burn out. I’ve been self employed for 10 years earning about $20k a year.

This whole thing cost us exactly nothing. Would be the same if we’d never had jobs.

Mum got stage 4 cancer in another country where she lived. 2.5 years of radiation, chemo, X-rays, mri, and dozens and dozens of specialist appointments (which she got paid for transit and free accommodation in the capital city) not to mention the mountains of serious drugs.

Total cost $0.

Anyone that argues against this is either not very intelligent (easily manipulated by the propaganda) or does not want to help others (“freeloaders”), or is getting rich from the status quo.

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

#672
post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's all true, but from a practical standpoint providers really have no way to accurately estimate a patient's out-of-pocket financial responsibility in advance. The current HIPAA adopted standard transactions don't allow for sending a prospective claim. So all they can realistically do is perform the procedure, submit a claim to the patient's health plan, wait for it to (maybe) be paid, and then send a bill to the…

Nothing stops a doctor or an office from saying "treatment X costs $Y." Doctors can't say how much an insurance provider will cover or what a patient's out of pocket will therefore be, but that is a separate issue further downstream of clear pricing for treatment.

Right, and as I already pointed out below, cash pay patients have the right to demand a Good Faith Estimate (GFE) from providers under federal price transparency rules.

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

#673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like that thing about about $15,000 toilets at DoD. What's actually happening is a cost allocation function where an agreed-on list price for a whole project is getting distributed pro-rata over as many different line-items as possible.

That seems like a way to disincentivize cost optimizations in the project (for the client).

Oh, sure, it's bad! It's just a particular kind of bad.

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

#674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this absolutely does not explain the US's wildly off-base per-capita expenditure because uninsured people still go in the denominator of the per-capita figure! I'm sure the per-insured-capita figure is worse but that's not what we are comparing! Americans are constantly trying to exclude uninsured people from their statistics (and, worse, from the care itself) but the comparable countries don't do this so it is u…

The fun part is when you break those numbers down between government and non-government expenditure. You’ll find that US governmental spending on health care per capita is higher than every other country’s entire (gov and non-gov) spending per capita. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/health-at-a-glance-2025...

Could this be because US gov healthcare spending takes place mostly via Medicare, which is specifically for people 65+?

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

#675
post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the reason hospitals have to charge so much is that they take massive losses on uninsured people in emergency rooms. Medicare for all means they don't have to treat anyone for free.

They are not taking any losses; they just charge the regular price with a very tiny profit margin. US healthcare costs are heavily inflated. Insurance is a scam that lets the rich get richer. All insurance should be non-profit. We all contribute to the pool at a time when we don't need it so we can use the money when we do, not to make CEOs or stockholders rich. That is how an insurance pool should work. Any excess m…

I'm not necessarily opposed to making all health plans non-profit, but that's kind of a red herring. Many of the largest insurers, like most Blue Cross Blue Shield Association members and EmblemHealth, are already non-profit. They generally don't charge plan members any less than their for-profit peers.

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

#676
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was a kid, my parents would say “with that attitude, you’re right.” We can and should expect a lot out of the people around us and especially the ones who choose civil service. Our grandparents ended slavery, got votes for women, established a merit-based civil service, fought fascism, passed equal rights legislation, and created the most dynamic large economy in history. We have problems, too, but we are not…

You notice this? It's literally everywhere. So much negativity. Sometimes I wonder how much is enemy action and how much is just depression or some other mental illness.

Producing political apathy and learned helplessness is an explicit purpose of the "Flood the zone" propaganda strategy.

It's a serious requirement for despots. You don't need a large and supportive group. You don't need 80% of the population expressing support for your acts.

All you need is like 20% of the population absolutely Ride-Or-Die levels of support for you, willing to do violence and hate on your behalf, and everyone else just kind of apathetic, unsure, or oppressed enough to stay down.

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

#677

impose universal health coverage & the jockeying will commence to see who is in charge of it. medical & diet fundamentalists will rejoice at the opportunity to seize control & force everyone to take certain drugs, eat or not eat certain foods or types of foods, exercise a particular way, surrender their organs at a particular age, or whatever else their hearts desire for everyone else. there have been so many rabbit…

Source on... any of that?

Fox News and 2010s Info Wars

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

#678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The first issue with this is that the gap between the uninsured and insured is not necessarily due to the lack of insurance. It could be due to factors associated with not having insurance, like living on the streets, being schizophrenic, being poor, and so on. Made up perspective to justify his angle. Not having healthcare access for a lot of people is 100% a policy choice. Waved off here by a list that really say…

The point he is making is valid: these groups are not randomly selected and are not representative of one another. Hence, it is not that simple to extrapolate from one to the other. Would free healthcare reduce deaths in uranium miners that are smokers? Probably some, but would it bring that to the same levels as non-smoking, non miners? Unlikely so. Hence it would be silly to pretend all the cancer deaths are due to…

It's valid within the argument structure but not to universal healthcare

My kid made a valid point that there was indeed a green MnM on the sidewalk next to the park.

Still didn't let them eat it.

It's a valid point in its own little bubble but other valid points mean more.

Stats are everywhere but stats that matter are rare.

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

#679
post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not taking any losses; they just charge the regular price with a very tiny profit margin. US healthcare costs are heavily inflated. Insurance is a scam that lets the rich get richer. All insurance should be non-profit. We all contribute to the pool at a time when we don't need it so we can use the money when we do, not to make CEOs or stockholders rich. That is how an insurance pool should work. Any excess m…

It doesn't matter what they charge if the patient doesn't pay it; which is what often happens with uninsured people showing up at the ER. > Any excess money at the end of the year should be moved to the pool for the next year, not as a bonus on CEOs' 100m+ salary Under the ACA, excess money in the pool must be rebated to policy holders. In practice, this worked for a few years, but eventually insurance companies ende…

It often happens with insured people showing up at the ER as well. Many patients don't pay their bills, either because they can't afford it or are just deadbeats. As overall healthcare costs have increased, insurers and employers have shifted more costs to plan members through higher deductibles / co-pays / co-insurance. So hospitals end up with a lot more bad debt, and this in turn causes further price inflation.

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

#680
post #640

A perfect Communist economy could save even more money, eliminate most ads, duplication, and poverty. But they never figured out how to make it work. I'm not opposed to a peaceful transition, but we'll need a big surplus and more idealism to make it happen.

"They" never intended for it to work and never tried.

Do away with the finance ledger.

Accurately measure where the people are.

Ensure enough resources flow there.

Special interests with a social moat to protect can pound sand or be hung from ports as a warning.

I would like to be free from hallucinated social belief Jeff Bezos is meaningful to humanity when mfer just gonna die and be forgotten like everyone else.

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