How much would it cost for the government to cover everyone with high deductible health insurance

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Its really just brainwashing from ideological zealots combined with the oligarchs trying to scare the public away from any policy changes that would affect their business models.

The reality is that even in the US, public health care is cheaper, better liked and more humane than private insurance.

Public insurance has lower overhead and lower reimbursement, so it costs less. You can cover people with medicaid cheaper than you can subsidize private insurance (which has premiums, deductibles, copays). Also medicaid is more humane. I don’t think they have balance billing, random out of network charges, etc.

https://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20180808/NEWS/180809915/aca-subsidies-cost-more-per-person-than-medicaid-is-that-sustainable

In America, if you tried to dismantle medicare (for its current beneficiaries) the tea party and liberals would both be enraged. Granted the tea party may be open to destroying it for their children’s generation but they want it for themselves and they want it badly.

Even in the US we love government health care. That is why rich people and ideological zealots fight so hard to prevent it from happening. They know once we get a taste of it, we will fight to the death to keep it.

22

I have never paid that much for insurance I don’t want to be forced to, ever. We are members of a Direct Pay clinic and a Christian cost-sharing ministry. (We get no insurance from work right now, and may never accept it if offered.) Far, far less in monthly fees, and far, far fewer restrictions that force us to change our lifestyles.

Someone who isn’t already sold on this might find out more information about government health care (say, Canada) from people who have lived through it and then moved to a freer system like the US, and discover that not everyone gives glowing reviews to the system, tells of people who did not receive the care they needed and were harmed or killed, and how Canada is moving toward privatization.
What good is every provider being network when all of them are closed in Sunday except the wildly overburdened ER?

We keeping hearing from politicians that the DC is utterly corrupt and totally sold out to corporations. Why should I then want to give DC more control over my life?

Have you ever needed an MRI? There are third world countries with more MRI machines per million than Canada. Wait times for treatment are horrifying.

https://www.fraserinstitute.org/studies/waiting-your-turn-wait-times-for-health-care-in-canada-2017

23

Hope that Christian cost-sharing ministry is there for you if you need it…

24

Insurance companies employ a lot of people; good paying jobs, too. If we went to a single payor system, a lot of these jobs would go away. Any idea how many jobs we’re talking about or what the cost would be in terms of unemployment? Even if they found other jobs, would they then be displacing the people who would have gotten those positions?

Yes, it’s a fraction of the premiums but I bet it’s not an insignificant number & that alone could spike unemployment rolls.

25

I think you are way underestimating what high deductible premium is. The $5000 referred to above is the employees share of the premium for an employee + family in a company sponsored health benefit plan.

The employer pays the majority of the premium as the benefit for the employee. Nationally, the average % of the total premium paid by the employer is 80-85%. So total high deductible premiums for employee + family, depending on the region, run somewhere between, $20-25k per year. An employee only premium is generally between $13-18k per year. So your $1.5 trillion annually is significantly understated. Try > than $3 trillion annually.

26

About 600 000 in the insurance industry. This does not count the people employed on the healthcare side to deal with insurace or billing.

However, nothing actually stops you from just paying the wages of 600 000 people for doing busywork if you want to. That might even save money since the insurance industry is a cost-adder, not cost-neutral. But yes “they will lose their jobs” is not inaccurate. It is only a negative though, if you believe that paying people for pointless jobs is preferable to them being recycled into the workforce.

Seems high. 3.2 trillion is the current total cost of all private insurance, all public plans such as Medicare, Medicaid etc and all out of pocket payments. 1.5 trillion is roughly average for a western nations UHC if adjusted up to US population numbers.

27

I’ve heard about a 17% tax on wages to fund UHC, which is pretty close to your figure. The problem, as you point out, is that most people look at that and think there’s no way they can afford another 17% coming out of their paycheck. But they forget/ignore the huge cost being paid by their employer. Most employers are paying between $6k and $15k per employee for health insurance, and employees are paying another $1,000 to $2,000 for individual coverage, and more to cover family members. Then, add in co-pays and deductibles.

I’m self-employed, so I have to buy my own insurance. Depending on which level I pick (bronze, silver, gold), my premiums total $12,000 to $20,000 per year to cover just my wife and I. Do you think I would object to paying 17 to 18% of my pay for insurance coverage? That would be a lot less expensive.

Employer coverage is what makes the entire system so difficult for most people to understand. Just like with social security taxes, they forget about what their employer is paying on their behalf.

I can’t even believe I’m posting this, because I’m a libertarian who thinks that government can’t do much properly or efficiently, and I think the federal government is WAY too big because they are involved in too many things. But, it seems clear to me that the insurance and medical industries are so expensive and wasteful, and so bureaucratic anyway, that PHC simply couldn’t be worse… or at least I can’t imagine it being worse.

28

You know the difference between a recession & a depression? A recession is when you lose your job & a depression is when I lose my job. :wink:

If those jobs were spread evenly around the country it might not be so bad but there is a concentration of them in this area. I think all of those people suddenly unemployed would have an impact towards lowering wages regionally as they suddenly look for jobs in other industries.

29

Yes, I used to be one of those people - until they no longer needed me due to increased technology and outsourcing to India.

So?

Presumably, those people would do what I had to do - get another job, possibly in another career type.

“Some people will lose their jobs” is not sufficient justification, in my mind, to avoid reforming the stupid, cruel, and horrible “system” we currently have in this country.

30

Exactly. That’s how economies work. You can’t lament the loss of buggy whip jobs, or ice deliveryman jobs. Sure, you can feel bad about people losing their jobs, but it shouldn’t even be a consideration in deciding what to do.

31

I guess that’s why government-run health care in other countries costs anywhere from half to less than one-quarter as much per capita as it costs in the US. :smiley:

32

I never said it was. This thread is what would it cost; I was bringing that up as a cost. More than just severance, if 600,000 people (or more), based upon Grim Render’s numbers, suddenly hit the unemployment line that would probably ripple the overall economy, moreso in this area where a lot of those people are employed.

33

I can’t speak to this directly, but I can speak to it second-hand.

My husband, rjk, was born and raised in Canada, and lived in BC before we married. He moved to Texas to marry me.

Before he moved, he was visiting me and had a seizure - FYI, this was the first seizure that we knew about.

First, BC healthcare paid for his emergency room visit in full.

Second, he went to his doctor when he got back. Doctor agreed it sounded like a seizure and sent him to a neurologist the same day.

Neuro looked him over and decided to get him an MRI.*

By the time Bob got back to his apartment, he had already missed two opportunities to get an MRI. He was able to call and get one set up as soon as he was ready to show up for one.

Now, I’m not saying that your link is lying … but it’s quite likely that it’s twisting the statistics to fit the narrative they want.

One aspect that most people don’t realize is that each province manages its own healthcare system, so comparing the US to Canada, you could cherry pick the best province… or the worst one.

And, FTR, Bob loathed our healthcare system.

*It has been 15+ years since this happened. I am a bit shaky on details now, but the gist is correct.

34

OTOH, a lot more people could work for themselves instead of having to remain in a job that wasn’t a good fit for them just because it gave them the healthcare insurance they need to survive.

35

But not all 600k people in the insurance industry would become unemployed. Some would be needed to administer the new system. So it’s a bit less than 600k.

36

Kind of sucks if you aren’t a Christian and don’t have access to your ministry, though, doesn’t it? Or do you advocate people change their religion to get healthcare? Healthcare should not be dependent on whether or not you believe in god, or which god you believe in.

And tell me, would your current insurance cover you for, say, cancer treatment? An organ transplant? Major accident like being burned in a house fire? Even WITH insurance that can incur crippling costs in the US, a risk people in other countries never have to face. Or are you planning to rely on the “spaghetti dinner” method of funding major catastrophic health care?

Since when is Canada “moving towards privatization”? Do you have a cite for that?

Are you unaware that people in the US don’t receive the care they need, and are harmed and killed by that?

Yep. I couldn’t get it until I had enough money saved up for my co-payment. Or if I was willing to finance said co-payment for 24% interest.

I was told that if I could not get the money (or borrow it) I would have to wait forever because if I didn’t I wasn’t getting that needed MRI. Don’t you find that horrifying?

Gee, would I rather wait six months or wait forever… Do I really need to think about that?

37

Glass factories employ a lot of people, too. Does that mean that it’s a good thing to go around throwing rocks at windows?

38

I advocate choice. I have no interest in forcing anyone else to be in the ministry. If someone wants to participate, they can’t whine about the rules. If you don’t like the rules, go play someone else’s game, but kindly let me use the system I want. It almost seems like you think that if you can’t use it, no one should be allowed to. Sour grapes?

It also almost seems like you think not one person in any socialized medicine state has ever lacked treatment or been harmed by a lack or by poor care.

You should investigate the VA.
Canada privatization: [URL=“Inside Canada's health care privatization movement | Vancouver Observer”]

39

privatisation

I was curious, so I fixed your link to see what cutting edge article about privatisation I was missing.

Oh. It’s from 2012.

Any day now, the hordes of dissatisfied Canadians will rise up to insist on their right to pay for health care every time they go to the hospital. It’s just a matter of time …

40

You’re quite right, of course. Just two Sundays ago, the Cub had a severe ear-ache suddenly, right after 5 pm. I googled our clinic, and it closes at 5 on Sundays. Lazy bastards, sucking the public teat, and slacking off just because it was 5 pm on a Sunday.

Do you know what we had to do?? We had to drive to a clinic we’d never been to before, way at the north end of the city. Instead of the usual five minute drive to our neighbourhood clinic, it was a 20 minute drive! The wear and tear on our tires and suspension must have been immense!!

And then when we got there, the paperwork! Since we were new patients, we had to fill in a form! An entire page of fill-in-the-blanks: name, address, phone numbers - who can remember that stuff?!? all to feed the health care bureaucracy!! And, they insisted I show my Health card. The whole sign-in took at least five minutes of my valuable time, five minutes I’ll never get back!

And then when we started to go to the waiting room, they started bossing us around! Told us that the doctor didn’t have many patients, given the time of day, and insisted we go straight to the examining room!

And the doctor made us wait in that little room for a whole 10 minutes, with some excuse that he was with “another patient”! A likely story.

Then he came in, and looked at the Cub’s ears, and wrote out a prescription, saying I should get it filled right away to stop the ear ache. Bossy bastard! Then he left to see “another patient”.

Why, it took us at least 30 minutes, start to stop, in that horribly inefficient government paid “clinic”.

If only we had private medical care … even if we had to wait, we’d have the satisfaction of knowing it was coming out of our own pockets, so by definition it would be better care.