Clearly of course once an NHS patient reaches 95 they cease to be a viable proposition and they selectively culled.
That depends upon the policy.
But aren’t we lead to believe that there is no restriction on such treatments in the USA medical system?
For anyone to be denied it, wouldn’t that mean that there is some sort of decision-making body that makes that choice?
You are forgetting that that sum would replace a lot of the current expenditure of about 3.2 trillion per year.
Most first world nation cover 100 % of the population for an average 4 000 - 5000 $ per citizen per year. For the US, with 320 million citizens, that would translate to 1.3 - 1.6 trillion. Not counting that the US might realize bigger advantages of scale. Current US costs are 10 000 per citizen.
What was the cost to the hospital for the rest of the staff needed to navigate billing and collecting for all the other private insurers they were in-network for?
Great counterpoints!
Likewise here in Canada, my mother at around 95 had excellent and costly medical care and hospitalizations for cardiac issues that didn’t cost her a cent, including home nursing care, personal care, and home medical facilities, all paid for by the public system.
Looks like Sarah Palin’s “death panels” meme is still going strong, in one form or another, basically because conservatives seem unable to accept that their vaunted free market system – all of whose incentives and drivers are exactly wrong for health care – is directly responsible for the astronomical costs of health care in the US, so they keep trying to find some inherent superiority that everybody is failing to see. But in fact, if there’s a single signature characteristic of private health insurance, it’s that industry’s ruthless and determined ability to deny claims and minimize payouts.
Any conversation about what Medicare-for-all would cost should include the difficult-to-define gains from ending people’s reliance on corporate health plans.
I work for a company with excellent health insurance, which they’re able to procure by spreading risk over a (mostly) younger work force. If I were to leave to form my own company, my health insurance rates would instantly quadruple. Combine 4x health insurance with the short term dip in income while I get my company running, and I get a huge disincentive to strike out on my own.
You’d think the GOP would want to free up all the would-be entrepreneurs (and potential job creators) like me, but I never hear anyone (on either side) advancing this argument.
28 dollars.
Who knows? Nobody. But if you cut out the middleman, the insurance industry, with a turnover of 850 billion p/a, then you make some real savings.
I suppose it’s a question of nuance, but it wouldn’t be “because you would be too much of a burden for society” but “because it’s not going to give anyone enough relief to be worth the money”.
That’s a decision that applies somewhere, somehow, in all systems. But yes, if you assume extending your Medicare system rules out negotiating price regulation of some kind, of course it will cost more per person. It’s often been said that the NHS is as much a cost control mechanism as it is a medical service.
No, in the US, your insurance company won’t deny treatment based on the burden to society. They’ll deny it based on the burden to their bottom line.
I’m sure the Americans will chime in shortly.
The mind boggles! 
Having been in the business of encouraging entrepreneurship, I don’t know how many times I’ve seen people stymied by needing to keep their existing plan.
I can’t offer a cite, but I suspect keeping their best employees from going off to start businesses on their own, possibly taking clients with them is a huge bonus for the established businesses. The cost of health insurance for the employees is only a competitive disadvantage when competing with foreign businesses, but keeping lean new competitors from popping up is of immediate benefit.
This was mostly at organizations that were trying to spin out startups. Like non profit research institutes and universities.
I’ll take a stab at guessing why this bizarre counterintuitive situation exists, and I’m not trying to be facetious or sarcastic. I think that Grim Render is right about the captivity factor. That’s a very important aspect of it, but it’s just one aspect. It’s very much in the interests of major employers that health insurance be tied to the job and considered an essential of life. The socioeconomic effects of this are huge. It’s often occurred to me how the unexpected loss of a job, often through no fault of the individual, can be so much more devastating in the US than in any other similar country.
But there are other factors. I also think that although many GOP-aligned conservatives understand in principle that universal health care would encourage independent entrepreneurship, this is a somewhat academic and abstract concept that is outweighed by more visceral ones. It is specifically outweighed by the visceral antipathy to the idea that the “undeserving” would get free health care, and that they – the hardworking GOP-aligned conservatives – would be forced to pay for it. This, ISTM, is the emotional kicker that makes it an overriding principle.
And the fact that they would be “forced” by government to do so, and the fact that in their minds it would increase the cost of health care, just puts a few more nails in the coffin of that idea, an idea already pretty much already scuttled by corporations’ interests in fostering a sort of feudal dependence on the part of their employees. Never mind that the objective evidence in every country in the world is that UHC substantially lowers per-capita costs because of very significant differences in how the plans are structured and administered; they just don’t believe it, or find it convenient not to believe it.
What they believe is that the health care system would become infested with death panels, and that all the poor and the homeless bums they see on the street would be getting health care at their expense, and to their detriment. What they believe is an elaborate fantasy that has been carefully constructed and promulgated for years by the vast and powerful health insurance industry, the very same one that Canada, to its everlasting credit, kicked out of the country half a century ago when single-payer health insurance was instituted, except for supplemental insurance needs that are not medically necessary. Blue Cross is still around, offering supplemental insurance, and that’s fine. Most of the rest of them buggered off back to the US and were never seen again, and that’s especially fine.
Don’t many Democrats think that way too?
I used to work in the computer department in a hospital and hung around with a woman in accounting. She would constantly complain about the doctors trying to rip of insurance companies or the government. She would reject some of the bills they were trying to send saying, “Not even the government was stupid enough to fall for this crap!”
Isn’t it also in their interests to minimise barriers and obstacles to flexibility in the labour market? It’s not just about workers wanting to leave, whether to establish their own business or move to another employer: it’s also about knowing that redundancies/restructuring would be that bit easier if it doesn’t necessarily mean catastrophe for the people laid off.
Seems to me that considering health cover “an essential of life” doesn’t necessarily require this particular person to be tied to this particular job (though employers may well find advantages to offering some or all employees something more than is available from the common basic model, as indeed happens in the UK).
Other countries manage to combine an insurance-based system with both personal “transportability” of cover and systemic cost control.
However, as has repeatedly been pointed out to you in the past, the UK also has a private system, and in the rare circumstances under which the NHS may deny you treatment one can opt to pursue private treatments.
So the difference is that in the UK 99.9%* of required medical treatments are covered by the NHS; for the few exceptions, if you can afford it (or have private insurance, which - since emergency and standard treatments are already covered by the NHS - is much cheaper than in the US) you can still pursue the treatment off the NHS. In the US, a considerably smaller percentage of required medical treatments will be only partially covered by your insurance plans (assuming you aren’t a victim of recission or can’t afford insurance at all). If they’re not covered, odds are very high you can’t afford the treatments. And since the UK system doesn’t require all the admin around determining eligibility and levels of coverage, the per capita cost of healthcare coverage is much lower once all costs and benefits are factored in.
And you think the US system is better?
- a rough estimate for illustrative purposes, not an actual statistic
A year? You obviously have no idea of how big projects work. This would take far more than a year to do. It is a big project, no doubt, just not that big when considering the size of the health insurance industry.
The easiest thing to do for staff is to take people who would lose their jobs in the traditional insurance industry - and take some of their facilities also. You’d need time for contracts employers have with traditional insurance to run out. You need the obvious tax law changes. It is a complex job, but not really an expensive one.