Seriously, why do you fear Universal Healthcare as a solution for US?

Perhaps the chronically ill whom they can churn procedures on

 

Why would it drive the quality down? Plenty of countries where doctors give just as much/quality care for less income.
Same with "out of business" .

A large part of the inflated cost the US has is just because prices are inflated .

 

I never said I wanted it. But since it was the topic, I wanted to find out what it would cost us. So what I did was just do the math using numbers I could find with some research. Another poster on that same thread had done his own research and came up with 25% which was very close to my findings. And this really wasn't "on top of the existing health care." It was computed as a replacement to existing health care. It was "Medicare for all" which would replace private insurance (as a primary) and Medicaid. The only niche this would leave for private insurance would be to supplement Medicare, because Medicare does have deductibles, co-pays, and pays 80%, which leaves residual amounts the patient owes.

I'm skeptical that we could get medical care for cheaper than Medicare because Medicare tends to hold costs down, and Medicare is not for profit. It pays what it designates as "usual and customary" costs, and so it frequently underpays hospitals and doctors, and they end up writing a lot off and/or collecting more from other patients who are not on Medicare.

On another thread, I showed how we could provide 4 years of tuition-free college to our kids. But in either case, whether it be health care or education, everyone believes someone else should pay for it, and everyone is a political constituency, and so very little changes.

I am admittedly sort of a spending and budgeting Nazi. By that I mean that I hold a rather cold, calculating view about spending and government services. Here it is ... If we as a society decide that we want something, we can have it if we're willing to pay for it. If we're not willing to pay for it, we can't have it. And if everybody believes that someone else should pay for it, we won't have it. Bottom line right there.

 

You can believe that, but this site has discussed the rationing of care ad nauseam. The NHS in the UK for instance is becoming increasingly notorious for rationing care. While you may consider that no big thing when it comes to the quality of care compared to what the US has now, many would not. Making people more comfortable in failure at the expense of other people's success is not the solution to anything.

 

Frank is burning cars? Really?

 

Quit wondering and look at the numbers. Insurance companies don't provide any healthcare services..

Young working people are paying for the elderly and premature babies who do NOT contribute to the system. Relieve them and their employers of high dollar insurance premiums, sell off the VA facilities to private groups, roll that money into Medicare. It would cost LESS and everybody would be covered.

 

Blackbeard seems to have lost control of his cool, Margot.

Gotta feel sorry for that lot. They are defending some of the most bizarre crap any group of sycophants have ever had to defend.

 

Other countries have successful health care systems comparable to ours in every way while serving ALL their citizens.

This includes systems with private providers as well as private insurance to cover features not provided by government.

Someone qualified to be a doctor has many alternatives. I know a guy from high school who quit being a doctor because he found he just didn't like working with patients. He does research instead. A sister in law found that dealing with insurance companies was essentially impossible for a single person office, so she started requiring cash (providing the info needed for customers to deal with their insurance). That didn't work, because insurance companies are just as bad to private citizens - if not worse. So, now she's a university professor plus some other work as well.

Our stories may hint at where to look, but they aren't more than that.

You'll have to provide real stats on how many doctors we have and how many are entering and leaving.

 

Thats because you want to amend the current system, a "medicare for all" .
And even there I doubt the cost would be any higher then what it is today. Its a lot easier curbing costs in such a large program then in a split and regional divided health care system there is now.


But thats only 1 way to go, the costs would depend on how such a thing was implemented .

They do that ebcause of other inflated costs, you have to see the whole not just small subset from it.

Thats it, the US currently for health care spends more then everyone else, yet care/health insurance isnt any better and is actually for less people avaible . It simply is a bad system. Tinkering around wont fundamentaly change anything and would be another obamacare that might patch up here and there but uttimatly wont improve the basics nor solve the problems of the inflated costs.


Other countries can do this I dont see why (besides the politics of it) the US cant do the same.

 

UK is only 1 possible road you can take yet its always brought up, why?

Plenty of middle ways around that combine basic health care provided by the state with private extra health care for who it wants.

The UK spends around half of what the US spends on health care, every comparison has to include the cost.

Its not about failure or succes its about providing service to the people, a service that everyone needs.

Quality of care in the US is equal to many western nations that spend a lot less then in the US. If you dont like the UK system fine, take the german, the swiss the belgian, the swedish,... All different from the UK.

 

A Medicare buy in would eliminate that.

Health Insurance companies could still exist. They exist in Canada...they just don't run the show like they do here.

 

It is a threat to insurance companies and healthcare oligopolies extorting big profits out of US citizens.

Universal healthcare is clearly the lesser of two evils.

 

I think you are on the right track in the last part of your post - and the analogy fits how the Red movement acts today but, I think that many of these folks - if they were transported back to a time where the evils of the robber barons was more obvious - they would be fighting like heck against these thieves.

The problem today is that the robber barons are doing the same thing - relegating the masses into indentured slavery - but, they have gotten much better at disguising their tracks.

The anti-establishment movements on both sides of the fence show that the people realize they are being sodomized but, they do not know where to put the blame or understand the mechanisms that are causing their plight.

Like unwitting dupes will spout dogma (fed to them by the robber barons and politicians and through the mainstream media) that actually supports their continued sodomization.

 

No one had gone to the Moon, either, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be done.

 

No, you have not. Can you purchase life-insurance tied to catastrophic insurance? No, you cannot, since the federal IRS tax code prohibits it.

Can you purchase only Emergency Room coverage? No you cannot.

You force the elderly to purchase maternity coverage. How is that a Free Market?

You have hospital monopolies and groups of hospitals operating as cartels, which is proof you don't have a Free Market. Hospital monopolies and cartels collude to fix prices above Market rates, so that you pay $26,000 for an open-heart procedure that really only costs $13,000. You have hospitals charging $55,000 for an appendectomy that really only costs $2,800, and then you have the hospital settling with the insurance company for $11,000, which is still greater than 3x the cost of the procedure. You have hospitals billing $117,000 for assistance surgeon fees for routine procedures.

You need to break up those hospital monopolies and cartels and prevent them from colluding to fix prices, so that you have some semblance of a Free Market.

 

There doesn't need to be a nation to have Free Market healthcare to see if it works. If we adopted your fallacious view, then we'd never have gone to the Moon.

 

Because it is an increasing failure with striking doctors I would imagine.

Which means it would not be universal healthcare because some would be getting services others do not and the do nots would cry about it.

Ironic considering you propose a system in which there is private insurance. Private spending on healthcare in the US doubles the number. Our public spending on healthcare is only about a third more than it is in the UK per per capita, but them again, the UK NHS is encouraged to turn people away.

We are all going to die. People have been doing it since long before health insurance came around. It is a matter of what people want without having to pay for it.

Or I could take the US system. If I couldn't run up huge medical bills from my fender bender, I am going to get a much smaller personal injury settlement, and that is free money right there.

 

It is like defense spending--a lot of these countries can do what they do because the US carries most of the weight when it comes to things like drug and diagnostic equipment R&D.

You keep saying it is comparable but it isn't. Our elderly get much more comprehensive medical care than they do in many OECD countries, have shorter hospital stays and go to the doctor less on a per capita basis because of the access to specialists.

Per https://www.theatlantic.com/busines...ions-spend-so-much-less-on-healthcare/374576/ :

"Compared with the average OECD country, the U.S. delivers (population adjusted) almost three times as many mammograms, two-and-a-half times the number of MRI scans, and 31 percent more C-sections. Also, the U.S. has more stand-by equipment, for example, 1.66 MRI machines per 6,000 annual scans vs. 1.06 machines. The extra machines provide easier access for Americans, but add to cost. Similarly, occupancy rates in U.S. acute care hospitals are much lower than in OECD countries, reducing the likelihood of delays in admissions, but building that extra capacity adds to cost. Aggressive treatment of very sick elderly also makes the mix expensive. In the U.S. many elderly patients are treated in intensive care units (ICUs), but in other countries they would receive only palliative care. More amenities such as privacy and space in hospitals and more attractive clinics also add to U.S. costs.

While the U.S. mix of services is disproportionately tilted toward more expensive interventions, the other OECD countries emphasize a “plain vanilla” mix. Compared with the U.S., the average OECD country has 30 percent more physician visits and more than 30 percent more hospital days per capita."

 

A healthcare system can most definitely be universal without being single-payer, by having a mix of government and private-sector, otherwise Germany, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, etc...do not have universal healthcare systems, which would be news to their citizens. But single-payer is not the way to go. It has way too many problems inherent. The only reason the U.K. even went with one was because of the socialists taking over and just deciding to nationalize a bunch of industries, including healthcare. It had nothing to do with conducting an in-depth study of different ways to structure a healthcare system and concluding, after much debate and analysis, on single-payer.

Yes, that's something a lot of people forget. The U.S. shoulders a lot of the burden for drug and diagnostic medical research.

 

The NHS was launched in 1948............

 

Yes...which is right when the socialists took over control of England, after WWII ended.

 

Israel has universal healthcare and they do a lot of medical R&D.

 

The thing I keep seeing over and over again by the detractors of Universal healthcare on this thread is this incessant blind belief of market principles. Normal market principles fall apart under health care for the following reasons:

1) The unpredictability of illness.
2) The diagnosis and efficacy of treatment varies widely.
3) The consumer, i.e. patient, is unequipped to properly evaluate care, especially under the duress of illness, to shop for the most cost-effective treatment.

Now if someone wants to take a stab at explaining how a for-profit healthcare system can effectively deal just with these three elements (to start off with), then maybe you have an argument to make. Until then, all I am seeing is the defense of ideology divorced from reality.

 

I'm not the one wearing a pussyhat, Frank.

 

And bears use porcelain facilities and a bidet.

The VA was doable too and that's fubar.