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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

#681

Post by nradov »

cwmoore wrote: post #648
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #590

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.

A lot of the rest of the reasons are carrying the deadweight of administering regulation, and dancing with the existing and prospective malpractice suits that randomly benefit the system sometimes, but always cost everybody, and warp the practice of medicine and patient healthcare experiences.

So what's the solution? Some states have already limited malpractice liability but that hasn't done much to hold down costs. When patients are harmed by preventable medical errors they should be compensated.

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

#682

Post by preg_match »

loeg wrote: post #584
preg_match wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a single soul on earth thinks single payer healthcare is free. 8 billion people, not one of them thinks it. They mean “free to the consumer at time of service”, which it is. Nobody is lying, everyone agrees, it’s just you who doesn’t understand.

> Not a single soul on earth thinks single payer healthcare is free. 8 billion people, not one of them thinks it. You are incredibly optimistic about a large swath of the population's understanding, unfortunately. > Nobody is lying There are plenty of people in this discussion making statements of fact that are false. Call it whatever you want.

No, they’re not false, you’re just misunderstanding. When people say “free” healthcare they do not literally mean all healthcare is zero dollars. They don’t mean nurses earn a wage of 0 dollars an hour.

No, they mean free at time of service, which they are.

Don’t believe me? Great, then ask them, without doing word gymnastics to try to trick them.

Should medical equipment cost 0 dollars to produce? Should doctors not earn any salary or wage? They will say no, 100% of the time.

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

#683

Post by grahar64 »

Of course it does, but only one country has to keep commissioning and ignoring studies to work out a group of 300million people can get better prices for everything if the incentive for the government is to decrease the price rather than increase it for their buddies

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

#684

Post by tptacek »

smallmancontrov wrote: post #603
caseysoftware wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The unfortunate truth is that if you break life expectancy out by ethnicity, it tells a different story. Generally Asians, Latinos, and Whites are above while Blacks and Native Americans are below and pull down the average: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9256789/#S12 If you break the groups out and individually compare against countries of similiar ethnicity, the US is often ahead. For infant mortality spec…

> they simply don't count too premature (under 22 weeks or 500 grams, iirc) and therefore don't consider them in the metrics Nope, that's not the reason. > The U.S. infant mortality rate was still higher than for most Europeancountries when births at less than 22 weeks of gestation were excluded. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db23.pdf Statistical hustling is common, but the most usual form is that the US e…

No, the uninsured are included in both infant mortality and, even more obviously, death statistics.

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

#685

Post by preg_match »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #587
preg_match wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a single soul on earth thinks single payer healthcare is free. 8 billion people, not one of them thinks it. They mean “free to the consumer at time of service”, which it is. Nobody is lying, everyone agrees, it’s just you who doesn’t understand.

The vast majority of those 8 billion people do not have single payer healthcare. A lot of Americans get confused on this, because we're the only country in the Anglosphere that doesn't do single payer, but it's far from universal globally.

I didn’t say they did. I said they understand that free healthcare is not literally free, but comes from taxes. Do not underestimate them, they understand very basic things.

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

#686

Post by tptacek »

soundwave106 wrote: post #573
tptacek wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cite the source for "access to healthcare" as a "very significant factor" in US life expectancy? We have pretty good numbers on the mortality cause differences between the US and other countries and they don't align with this claim (unless you're doing some bank-shot argument about how access to health care makes our car crashes more lethal or something). You'd want to be looking for a scholarly source that puts numb…

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK62376/

This article repeatedly makes the point I made; I assume you cited it to back me up?

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

#687

Post by nradov »

moregrist wrote: post #625
tptacek wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and they all generally get there by paying practitioners much less than the US does (by integer multiples). Single-payer, which this working paper equates with "universal coverage", is in fact not the norm among universal systems; besides using Medicare to ration the supply of practitioners, the original sin of our system is employer-based coverage, not payer structure. Health care is an absolutely massive indu…

Funny how one of the arguments against Medicare in the 60s was that providers wouldn’t accept it. Turns out when you have the choice of accepting lower payment per patient for Medicare or having a lot fewer patients, you choose the lower payment per patient. I would expect the same situation here. Doctors would grumble, but no one would force them to accept patients on whatever “Medicare for all” would be called. Not…

Nope. More and more providers are dropping out of Medicare, or imposing limits on the number of Medicare patients that they're willing to see. It's tough to sustain a financially viable medical practice on Medicare rates, especially for primary care in HCOL areas. Medicaid is even worse. There are a lot of patients who nominally have coverage but in practice are functionally uninsured because they can't find a local doctor to take them on.

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

#688

Post by moate »

dominotw wrote: post #156
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…

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…

You're right, it's not just that people opposing it are stupid or brainwashed: Some of them, to your point, are selfish and don't want others to have access to the nice things that they have.

Can you explain why those people DESERVE access to better care? Do they have more complex/rare diseases that require specialized treatment? Are there specialists who only work at that hospital? Those feel like warranted needs. But "I can pay more so I should have better things" is a ruinous worldview that, at its end, is just Might Makes Right.

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

#689

Post by bigmadshoe »

tptacek wrote: post #620
MrSkelter wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Healthcare reform isn’t actually hard. Every advanced country has done it bar the United States. In every case costs have gone down and outcomes have improved. You always build on what you have because you can’t pause healthcare for very obvious reasons. Hence a lot of different systems all with the same aim. Controlled costs and universal coverage. The idea the US is somehow different and cannot make the change is t…

Yeah, and they all generally get there by paying practitioners much less than the US does (by integer multiples). Single-payer, which this working paper equates with "universal coverage", is in fact not the norm among universal systems; besides using Medicare to ration the supply of practitioners, the original sin of our system is employer-based coverage, not payer structure. Health care is an absolutely massive indu…

Why do doctors need to be paid integer multiples more in the US than every other country on earth? This is not rhetorical, I mean it sincerely.

And I’m aware that medical debt is a big issue, but it seems like a chicken-or-the-egg type problem. Of course you can charge $500k for a medical degree when the doctor can make it back and then some in 5-10 years.

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

#690

Post by shimman »

davidfekke wrote: post #306

"You can have state of art Healthcare, or you can have Universal healthcare, you can't have both." -- Malcolm Gladwell The way that universal health coverage saves money is by rationing care. You do not save lives when you ration care.

Malcolm Gladwell is a massive charlatan and hack. Seeing tech bros use him to discuss healthcare policy (Malcom Gladwell is neither a health professional, public health expert, nor has he worked in the healthcare industry in any real capacity, nor has he ever discussed the plight of workers in the US once during his entire career) feels on point for out of touch our industry is.
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