711–720 of 1001 posts
But how can we support israel? /s
The USA spends the equivalent of about $10 per citizen per year on Israel. Medicaid spends about $10,000 per recipient per year. But antisemite math has its own rules.
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Thats not every where nor is it everyone. Im not saying it will specifically be bikes but the government will be incentivized to have a healthier population. It could be higher tax on cigs, or sugars, it could be more annual leave it could be any number of wellbeing policies.
From a political philosophy standpoint, this is exactly why many people oppose a single-payer healthcare system. When the government is paying for everything it creates a financial incentive for an intrusive nanny state. We can argue about the positives and negatives, and maybe we would be healthier overall, but many Americans simply don't want the government telling them what to do. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/bo…
>A single-payer universal health care system could cover every American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and still cost $1 trillion less than the system it would replace, according to a new preprint study led by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health.
FWIW, the methodology that produced this particular result is known to have significant issues. The claimed effect disappears after correcting for them. It also isn't the first time that these authors have published similar studies with these issues. They are not a credible source. Universal health coverage may save lives and money but this study doesn't provide actual evidence for it.
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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.
Most patients never file a lawsuit, even if things don't go well, and most injuries that aren't deaths or newsworthy are not worth the trouble to an "overburdened" court system itself imposing a lot of burdens.
And the quality life years lost waiting to share a verdict with attorneys ought to count for everyone affected, not just those who spearhead a trial by catastrophe.
I think the solution is to make the practice of medicine more scientific, and less dominated by competitive incentives, but as long as research and development, reform, or even consumer choice, is strictly a cost, that will be considered "too expensive", if not "too risky".
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> 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.
And this is precisely why nothing will ever change. I tell everyone who will listen to me on my soap box, we will never get universal healthcare until we divorce healthcare from employment (by that I mean, make it to where businesses cannot offer benefits at all). Personally, I would retire early. I have enough to cover bills and reasonable HC costs, but the way it is now, I'll just keep plugging away for a few more…
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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.
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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...
In that link, government/compulsory for the United States seems to indicate times when an insurance company covered it. Voluntary/Out of Pocket is when insurance company wasn't required to cover and did or person paid out of pocket. Even if it's US Government only per capita with people the government insures, it makes sense it would be so high because only people on government insurance are the poor/disabled AND old…
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> 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.
Hospital billing practices are often terrible or even fraudulent, but stories about the $37 aspirin are generally misleading. Most hospital claims and bills are actually coded around day rates and DRGs, so even if the aspirin shows up as a line item it doesn't actually impact the patient's financial responsibility or the amount allowed by their health plan. (I'm not trying to defend such a confusing system, just expl…
This is one of the areas where more standardization would certainly help. If there were more standardization of which codes disallow which other ones (which can currently vary wildly by plan even with the same insurer, must less across insurers), then a lot of line items could actually get removed as truly redundant, vastly simplifying the bill.
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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.
They don't! It's a huge problem! It's probably the problem in US health care, which, despite my own belief that single-payer is bad policy, is in fact a total shitshow.
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…
>> Medicare pays 50% less than private insurance. So doing this would require either layoffs, cutting salaries for doctors/nurses/etc, or both. This may well be the right decision for society as a whole--that's a big part of the debate here--but there's no free lunch. You arent considering 1. Hospitals eating the cost of the uninsured, which this would solve 2. Hospital spending tons on administrative duties fighting…
Wouldn't it just transfer the cost from the hospitals to the universal coverage agency? This would make the financial picture even worse for the proposed system.