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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

#771

Post by bentt »

frmersdog wrote: post #754
bentt wrote: post #724

There 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.

If someone shoots some more CEOs, they'll have a change of heart. (A lot of people are going to be very mad at me about this comment, without having the awareness to understand that this is the inevitable conclusion to, "You wanna play rough, ah?!"ing people's access to life-saving treatment. Please grok that we can preclude any more assassinations by cutting profits and letting people get the care they need.)

If it were only the CEOs that were at fault you might have a point. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of Americans benefit from this system and the leaders are accountable to them - the shareholders, employees, and on down the chain.

Congress is our only hope, along with a president who signs reform.

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

#772

Post by mft_ »

frmersdog wrote: post #754
bentt wrote: post #724

There 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.

If someone shoots some more CEOs, they'll have a change of heart. (A lot of people are going to be very mad at me about this comment, without having the awareness to understand that this is the inevitable conclusion to, "You wanna play rough, ah?!"ing people's access to life-saving treatment. Please grok that we can preclude any more assassinations by cutting profits and letting people get the care they need.)

You’re right. Two related observations:

1) In the immediate aftermath of Thompson being shot, policies were deliberately briefly softened. Anecdotally, people were helped to live longer by this. It didn’t last long.

2) The response to Thompson’s assassination was the closest I’ve seen to a class consciousness almost forming in the US, as people from across the political divide who had suffered at the hands of the healthcare insurance companies found common ground.

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

#773

Post by refurb »

TuringNYC wrote: post #706
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…

>> 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…

What hospitals makes has nothing to do with physician pay - those are separate categories. Hospitals aren’t going to magically start giving some of their profit to doctors to help cover their lower fees.

OP makes a good point. The studies assumes two diametrically opposed things will happen - doctors will take a 50% pay cut but access to primary care physicians will increase.

Why would we solve the primary care physician shortage by cutting their pay?

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

#774

Post by anjel »

opo wrote: post #759
Detrytus wrote: post #732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>...Funny thing is: if you tell the hospital that you do not have an insurance they will charge you a price that actually sounds reasonable, say $700 for a CT scan That has not been my experience. Insurance negotiates lower rates and without insurance, the full fare price suggested price has always been higher.

Providers are contractually forbidden by insurers to show you the much lower "out of pocket+ price schule if you have insurance. It's why the first question posed to new patients is always " do you have insurance?"

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

#775

Post by Supermancho »

gryfft wrote: post #239
fragmede wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a very funny way of looking at the world.

Many people feel that winners should be rewarded and losers should be punished. Systems thinkers may try to push notions of connectedness in societies, and moralists may try to push notions of universal equality of human dignity, but in the end, both are overwhelmingly outnumbered by tribal thinkers, who wish to harm the outgroup at absolutely any cost.

Ironic

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

#776

Post by nijave »

frmersdog wrote: post #754
bentt wrote: post #724

There 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.

If someone shoots some more CEOs, they'll have a change of heart. (A lot of people are going to be very mad at me about this comment, without having the awareness to understand that this is the inevitable conclusion to, "You wanna play rough, ah?!"ing people's access to life-saving treatment. Please grok that we can preclude any more assassinations by cutting profits and letting people get the care they need.)

I'm skeptical. It will be cheaper to hire a couple security guards and buy a couple armoured cars then turn away profits.

The reaction was short lived while the insurance companies figured out how to bolster security and return to the usual.

Look at what's happening in California with the proposed wealth tax.

>Page’s co-founder, Sergey Brin, has poured at least $45 million into the Building a Better California Super PAC specifically dedicated to blocking the tax

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

#777

Post by andrehacker »

bentt wrote: post #724

There 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.

Right.... but it is also an industry that provides an insane amount of (often well paying) jobs to a large amount of people to do "make work", admin tasks.

Reliable details are hard to come by, but some estimations are that more people in the industry are doing admin tasks than instead of providing care, admin tasks that will be reduced drastically once the industry is streamlined.

Once we get affordable care there will be less people who can... afford.

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

#778

Post by nijave »

bayarearefugee wrote: post #710
loeg wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We want consumers to consider cost when evaluating what services to buy, though. That's a feature. The medical emergency debt statistic is just the usual thing of people not really understanding how medical insurance works.

> We want consumers to consider cost when evaluating what services to buy, though. A lot of medical care involves inelastic demand because your options are 1) pay this or 2) suffer and/or die. "The market" does not function correctly with inelastic demand curves. Yet another reason to socialize healthcare.

This is the crux. Capitalism doesn't work here and a fair bit of people like to pretend it does.

Then there's the people who bemoan "paying for someone else's healthcare" while completely ignoring that's what they're doing in the current system anyway.

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

#779

Post by vivekd »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #312

Universal Health Coverage has a lot of other benefits: 1. It detaches health insurance from the employment market. This means those minimum wage walmart jobs just became more feasible, or any low end job really, since their is no pressure to provide "benefits" anymore. This would seriously lubricate the labor market, because the friction to providing, taking, and changing a job is reduced. 2. It ends a bias for group…

As a Canadian, I would caution against the kind of universal health plan we have. But yes I agree there should be some kind of public healthcare. Perhaps more as a government owned hospitals and clinics alongside the private ones rather than the fully public system we have here which comes with its own host of problems.

I think it's easy to shout free healthcare as a slogan but I think the important bit is how it's implemented.

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

#780

Post by tptacek »

cwmoore wrote: post #740
tptacek wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have numbers for this, we don't need to derive them axiomatically. Practitioner compensation is the largest component of health provider spending. Liability coverage is the second largest component of admin spending, which is 25% of provider spending.

“We have numbers” is always refreshing, especially in a shell game. Cost of all licensed medical practitioners? Or overweighting incomes of outlier CEO physicians? 25% is a steep tax on health in any case.

At the point where you're just dismissing the CMS NHE, you're well into the terrain of unfalsifiability.
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