Who Will Pay for Democratic Socialism’s $200 Trillion Cost?
https://www.cato.org/blog/who-will-pay-democratic-socialisms...
Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study
761–770 of 1001 posts
Re: Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study
#762I'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…
One wonders what the lowered stress vis a vis healthcare concerns that a reformed system would take care of would do for our ability, as an electorate, to make better decisions in other arenas.
Re: Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study
#763Earlier 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.
Hospital billing practices are often terrible or even fraudulent, but stories about the $37 aspirin are generally misleading. Most hospital claims and bills are actually coded around day rates and DRGs, so even if the aspirin shows up as a line item it doesn't actually impact the patient's financial responsibility or the amount allowed by their health plan. (I'm not trying to defend such a confusing system, just expl…
I have the best health plan available (as a lifelong heart patient) from my provider, which owns the hospital. I've been charged 250$ for a covid vaccine, which was administered when I was recovering from a surgery to stop Sepsis. My hospital bill was itemized and I called to verify it.
I would be able to dispute a double room billing, but I was sedated and dying so I took whatever they offered, assuming good faith.
Re: Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study
#764I'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’s essentially zero doubt that universal healthcare would save over $1T per year.
How do we know? The experiment has been done multiple times, all over the world. In the worst case (Sweden), healthcare is a bit short of $5K per capita per year, or around $1.7T. We’ve actually got a nice margin to achieve $1T, even if we remain the worst.
I agree health care reform is hard, though. We have a clear roadmap on how it can work a lot better. But what’s the political path forward?
As someone who’s actually fiscally conservative, single-payer universal healthcare is an absolute no-brainer, but, ironically, the people who call themselves fiscal conservatives will fight it to the death (well, not that ironic — at this point we all understand that, in politics, what groups purport to believe and what they actually believe have little to do with each other).
Re: Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study
#765Legislate transparent pricing for all medications and procedures first. Paying 40 dollars for lozenges in the ER is insane. Right now the system has an opaque pricing structure which makes no sense. Force hospitals to expose API's with transparent pricing.
Fix the principal/agent problem by decoupling health insurance from employment by not having health insurance be paid for with pre-tax dollars.
Re: Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study
#766Earlier quoted context omitted.
this is a great example. What a horrible human... https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article...
This is a top-level example but you do not have to look at the top, really. The whole private insurance system is a scam at every level. I mean: I immigrated to US couple years ago, and I can tell you that any hospital visit, or a diagnostics, such as CT scan or ultrasound are 15-20x more expensive here than in my home country (which is in the EU). Funny thing is: if you tell the hospital that you do not have an insu…
This is true and I have seen it in many cases.
Re: Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study
#767There are a lot of people making a lot of money on the inefficiencies of the US system. They won’t give up their revenue streams without a fight, and they are filthy rich on the backs of sick people. You better believe they will play dirty.
We're also at the point that if there existed validated evidence that 'Universal Healthcare' made everyone rich and happy and beautiful and able to freely stroke kittens at will then we would still vote against it as a socialist conspiracy benefiting weak, lily livered failures.
Re: Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study
#768Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Force hospitals to expose API's with transparent pricing. Unless you're uninsured (which is a whole separate clusterfuck), the hospitals aren't the ones who decide how much you pay for any service - the insurance companies are. The sticker price that hospitals charge is almost meaningless and is intentionally high because it's used as the starting point for negotiations, which always bring the price down (never up)…
It should be illegal to charge different prices for the same thing to different customers.
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Re: Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study
#769Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> 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…
Those are two real effects, but together they wouldn't compensate for the rate cuts. About 8% of the population is uninsured. The uninsured population skews younger, with less healthcare utilization (Medicare already covers everyone 65 and older). Another comment in this thread estimated billing overhead at 8.5%. Medicare for All would eliminate some, but not all of this, since Medicare is still a claims-based system…
> .. 8% of the population is uninsured. ..
this is Bogus, one of the first argument hospitals make for inflated pricing is that they have to cover the cost of uninsured. if the uninsured doesnt exist then the whole line of BS argument falls.
Re: Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study
#770I'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…
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