Yeah. 21T is what will probably be spent on HC in the next
So, would I want to spend 250 a month on insurance that I'll have to change each time I get a new job or 350 a month on taxes that goes with me and which I only pay when I'm not laid off? I mean, it's a good question. Right now, I'd be ok with expanding Obamacare to what it was when it was originally proposed or how Pelosi passed it. I get it. Too many people are dependent on the status quo to immediately nationalize a sixth of the economy. That girl I almost married almost voted for Romney over Obamacare because she was into hospital revenue.
Cute. You really have no idea how expensive insurance is without subsidies from the tax system or employers or directly from the government, especially when you get old. Here's a hint. IT"S DAMN EXPENSIVE!!!! I'm a 50-55 year old non-smoker who gets his insurance from the Marketplace. Pre-subsidy it's around $900/month. Thankfully, the subsidy cuts that down considerably, but it's still a pain.
Angry_weasel knows what he’s talking about. You’re just marveling at big trees with no concept of the forest you’re lost in.
I'll grant that single payer will reduce costs, but if you think it'll cut two-thirds of the cost, you're living in fantasyland. By one-third is possible, but going beyond that is going to lead to considerable impacts on quality and availability of care. Already with some specialties, if you're on Medicaid, you're screwed. You may have to wait months if there's even a specialist available. Squeeze the turnip too much and there will be no more blood as health care providers leave the system to do other things that pay more. Moreover, even if we were to get health care down to the fantasy one-third level, we're still talking an average of $800 per worker per month in costs.
This is true, but even beyond this single payer itself won’t be doing the cost regulation - the government will.
Regulation in most industries makes it more difficult to start and run a business. This is generally a bad thing. However, when it comes to medical costs, people truly have no clue what they are paying for or how much, and are in a much worse position to make smart purchasing decisions.
If we could set a Medicare fee schedule for all services in the United States, we wouldn’t need to destroy the free market for insurance to regulate costs - costs would come down all on their own. If we were to institute TORT reform and lower the legal risks associated with performing risky procedures at the patients’ behest, operating costs for hospitals would go down and doctor wages would go up. Same with providing tax breaks to hospitals.
The problem is that hospitals need to be able to make money or else there is no reason for them to exist. If you address the issues hospitals and doctors are facing while simultaneously limiting costs through regulation, you would see a fairer system wherein hospitals can more easily make a stable profit year to year and consumers (including health insurance providers) would be on the hook for significantly lowered costs. Via the Obamacare market, those lowered costs would translate almost directly into people’s pockets.
In other words, there absolutely is a way to fix the healthcare system in this country through the mechanisms provided by Obamacare. The main losers of such a fix would be ambulance-chasing lawyers and other bloodsuckers at the fringes of the healthcare industry who profit off of the wide variance of outcomes and massive costs that people are willing to pay when it comes to their own health (or are willing to award when it comes to malpractice suits).
A friend of mine’s father is a pediatric neurosurgeon at a prestigious hospital and makes upwards of 500k per year. The reason he makes this much (outside of how skilled he is) is that he pays upwards of 100k per year in doctor’s insurance to protect from malpractice suits, despite never once having to defend against such a suit in his 15+ years working. This is the impact that medical malpractice lawsuit payments have on the industry: doctors need to be paid exorbitant amounts for their services because the financial risks involved with executing their profession are so insanely high. I know that he for one would happily take a 150k pay cut if he had to stop paying for insurance to cover merely the possibility of a multimillion dollar lawsuit against him in the event that one time a risky procedure is a failure.
Now obviously our malpractice laws are in place to provide incentives to doctors to do good work, since when they do bad work it irretrievably damages the lives of others (or even kills others). However, I would suggest that, as in most cases, massive negative consequences have less effectiveness than marginal negative consequences combined with positive incentives to do a good job - I highly doubt there are a significant number of doctors out there who would do things differently if the malpractice lawsuits were 10% of what they currently are.
