10 hours ago, southsider2k5 said:

The VA literally pretends that entire diagnoses don't exist to make sure that most vets die from it by the time legal action can be taken to force them to admit that it was a real thing.

Sounds remarkably like private insurance.

16 hours ago, Jenksismyhero said:

Isn't that savings they found on the cost of drugs/administration, not the actual system? So yeah, drugs are cheaper and going to a doctor is cheaper, but you're adding 30 million more people onto the system that are not currently insured, among other things, so it would still cost whatever they find - 36 trillion over ten years - to fully fund it.

 

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/study-medicare-bill-estimated-326-trillion-56906940

No thanks.

You've missed the point. The Mercatus Center study, which is not going to be providing favorable calculations for the cost of Medicare for All given their ideological bent, came up with the estimate of $32T over ten years.

 

If you take that number at face value and compare it to what projections of our national healthcare spending under the status quo over ten years will be, M4A is cheaper! We will spend more for worse outcomes and 30 million fewer people covered with our garbage privatized system.

The VA is unique in the population it treats and how it is run. M4A isn't a VA or NHS style plan where the government would actually operate the health care providers. It's an insurance plan. And even with that said, Medicare remains a very well run and popular program and the VA has higher favorability ratings than private insurance care even with its problems. Attempts to "fix" the VA via privatization have failed thus far.

It's just amazing that this country has to keep having these conversations as if a single payer health insurance plan is some wild new hypothetical program that's never been tried. It has, in different forms in different countries, and the results are all better than our system. And we provide single payer for the elderly and it works well in this country! We already provide it for the population that needs the most and the most expensive health care!

7 hours ago, caulfield12 said:

Fine, then why does it work so well in China?

They have more capital reserves than any country in the world, and everyone can cheaply see a doctor in 30-45 minutes...the same day they have a problem.

The only problem is that it’s so affordable, people take their young kids there for trivial issues...whereas we wait until near death to dare going to a hospital in the US.  This, invariably, makes the long term costs of avoiding treatment even more onerous.   Or you just end up with more medical bankruptcies or costs getting written off, with premiums consistently rising on the most high risk insurance pools.

China has a slightly different government, cultural and legal structure.

45 minutes ago, ptatc said:

China has a slightly different government, cultural and legal structure.

Sure, but the argument used is always that the US is too big or too diverse.  Well, China has a population five times that of the US.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/18/upshot/best-health-care-system-country-bracket.html

Why can’t we just take the best elements of U.K., France, Switzerland and Germany?

 

6 hours ago, StrangeSox said:

You've missed the point. The Mercatus Center study, which is not going to be providing favorable calculations for the cost of Medicare for All given their ideological bent, came up with the estimate of $32T over ten years.

 

If you take that number at face value and compare it to what projections of our national healthcare spending under the status quo over ten years will be, M4A is cheaper! We will spend more for worse outcomes and 30 million fewer people covered with our garbage privatized system.

The VA is unique in the population it treats and how it is run. M4A isn't a VA or NHS style plan where the government would actually operate the health care providers. It's an insurance plan. And even with that said, Medicare remains a very well run and popular program and the VA has higher favorability ratings than private insurance care even with its problems. Attempts to "fix" the VA via privatization have failed thus far.

I think it's $93 billion a year cheaper, on the assumption that doctors and hospitals will take 40% less than what they currently get paid by private insurers (seems far fetched). How many millions of jobs would be lost? What's the economic cost going to be of shifting the private insurance industry into the government? $93/billion a year worth?

I'm still not sure why you think it's a garbage system for the majority of people but you think Medicare and the VA are great. Medicare has the same types of issues - there are restrictions as to what they'll pay, how many times a year they'll pay for it, and what gets covered. You still have deductibles and co-pays. You have limits on days in the hospital, etc. etc. They're just as much of a headache, if not more, than private insurance. 

If we're talking about a government run system, I can't believe anyone would be on board with that. We'd literally be at the mercy of Congress to pass expenditure bills to provide enough funding for coverage, including research. If there are no incentives of making profit, what's the incentive for creating new drugs, tests, etc? What's the incentive to providing the best care possible (see, the VA). 

As I said before, the system isn't perfect but IMO its better than anything the government (OUR government) can efficiently operate.

 

5 minutes ago, Jenksismyhero said:

I think it's $93 billion a year cheaper, on the assumption that doctors and hospitals will take 40% less than what they currently get paid by private insurers (seems far fetched). How many millions of jobs would be lost? What's the economic cost going to be of shifting the private insurance industry into the government? $93/billion a year worth?

I'm still not sure why you think it's a garbage system for the majority of people but you think Medicare and the VA are great. Medicare has the same types of issues - there are restrictions as to what they'll pay, how many times a year they'll pay for it, and what gets covered. You still have deductibles and co-pays. You have limits on days in the hospital, etc. etc. They're just as much of a headache, if not more, than private insurance. 

If we're talking about a government run system, I can't believe anyone would be on board with that. We'd literally be at the mercy of Congress to pass expenditure bills to provide enough funding for coverage, including research. If there are no incentives of making profit, what's the incentive for creating new drugs, tests, etc? What's the incentive to providing the best care possible (see, the VA). 

As I said before, the system isn't perfect but IMO its better than anything the government (OUR government) can efficiently operate.

 

A substantial portion of medical research is already done on a not for profit basis through medical labs and institutes that are funded by the government. Meanwhile, a substantial amount of pharmaceutical research done by the private sector is done in such a way that it is useless in the sense of furthering health ends - rather than improving health care quality it is done to get around patent regulations and to allow companies to continue charging higher costs for drugs that are no longer generic.

An alternative system where much of research is government funded would almost certainly be far more efficient, and frankly you could most likely dramatically increase pharmaceutical research funds just by cutting back on the expenditures on pharmaceutical advertising. 

Furthermore, we also have other mechanisms of funding research that are known to work - innovation prizes could be established and government funded, allowing private labs to take stabs at those topics without having to worry about the lab putting the product out on the market for a thousand dollars a pill as we see happening now when major new drugs are developed. 

Right, most research, especially any basic research, comes out of NIH funded labs not private enterprises.

 

If you want to quibble with the cost projections for M4A are when they're coming from a group that's strongly ideologically opposed to M4A, I'm not sure what numbers you'd ever expect.

 

Medicare has much lower overhead and higher approval ratings than private insurance. You'd also unburden so many businesses from also having to manage health care plans as they currently do and give people more freedom to strike out on their own or even just change jobs without having to worry about their health insurance going away or substantially changing. You'd also eliminate the need for doctor's office and hospitals to spend so much time and effort just handling the myriad of insurance companies and claims out there.

 

This isn't some magical hypothetical. It's what every other major country does for less money than we spend and with better outcomes and covering everyone rather than leaving a substantial portion of their population to languish. Maternity mortality is increasing in this country, ffs! Spend some time taking to people in other countries about health care, and they will be almost uniformly horrified by the details of the US system. There's a reason no one is clamoring to emulate it.

 

 

BCBS is lowering the price of several Obamacare plans in IL for next period. Most insurers are only slightly raising prices.