Are you in denial of the fact that every developed country in the world spends far less on health care than the US for the same or better outcomes? Because having everyone covered for medically necessary health care while spending much less per capita is what it’s all about, and every country in the world has done it. It isn’t a fantasy. If you want fantasies, those are things like “government-run health care”, “socialized medicine”, “government bureaucracy in health care”, and, of course, the ubiquitous “death panels”. You know, the kinds of fabrications and scaremongering that the Repubs tried back in the 50s and early 60s to kill Medicare, and more recently to try to kill the ACA. It’s helpful to them that there are things about UHC/single-payer that are counter-intuitive and require sound understanding of how these systems really work, such as the elimination of bureaucracy from front-line health care decision-making, and the transfer of decision responsibility from the insurance bureaucrats to the doctor and his patient.
I feel like a lot of us have tried, but I feel the well has been so poisoned that anything ‘the left’ wants is automatically bad to most on the right.
When Vermont hired a world class health economist to design a potential single payer plan, they found that after 10 years their health care costs would be about 25% lower under single payer than they would be under business as usual. FWIW, just adding a strong public option reduced medical spending by 16%.
https://www.workerscenter.org/2011-peoples-toolkit/summary-hsiao-report
So if medical costs would be $12000 per capita in a decade under a system as usual plan, under single payer they’d only be $9000 or so. That frees up an extra $3000 per capita to spend on other things (education, infrastructure, renewable energy, etc)
If America’s health care were as cost efficient as Europe, we’d save over a trillion dollars a year.
With a trillion dollars a year we could likely balance all the budgets on the federal and state level (at least before the Trump tax cut), Provide free public college to everyone, provide subsidized daycare and triple investments in renewable energy with the savings.
How does hyperbole advance a debate, let alone a Great one? :dubious:
Hyperbole, sarcasm, satire, and other literary devices have been effectively used throughout history to convey truths about the world, often in entertaining fashion. And of course constantly disparaged by the suddenly humorless partisans whose positions they ridicule.
Instead of your incessant demands for a “cite” for the statement, why don’t you just take two seconds to Google the phrase “Americans’ knowledge of the world”. And peruse the several hundred million results. Enjoy. Some of them are hilarious, most are depressing. You’re welcome.
tl;dr: Most Americans know almost nothing about how health care works in the developed world outside the US, and what they think they know is almost invariably wrong.
So perhaps the more relevant question is how this abject ignorance helps to advance health care reform in the US.
The United States is not the rest of the world. Why should we care?
Let me guess. You’re a non-American criticizing Americans. How original.
The US political system is too dysfunctional for us to ever have single-payer. It would likely require so much horse-trading, and so many backroom deals, and so much kludge to get through congress, that it might not be any better than what we already have. And this assumes it ever happens at all, given that one party (Republicans) is completely against single-payer. I don’t trust our congress to tie their shoes, let alone re-engineer 1/6 of the economy.
And about half the country gets insurance at the worksite, such as myself. Most of us like what we have, and the disruption of moving off of employer-provided insurance would be a huge hurdle for policy-makers. And this is one of the reasons the ACA was designed in the way it was designed.
So, the most likely way forward is the continued mix of public and private, with some growth in public. You will probably see a state-by-state march toward UHC, led by blue states. You will see more states expand Medicaid. You will see some states increase subsidies for private insurance, and some will reinstate the individual mandate. I think a few states might experiment with a Medicaid buy-in, i.e., a public option.
Will the US ever get to even full UHC, let alone single-payer? I’m somewhat skeptical. It’s easy to do technically. We could boost the ACA’s subsidies and make it rich enough for the entire country to eventually be covered. We could do a public option on the ACA exchanges, too. And yes, even single-payer could technically happen, by making Medicare For All. But politically, and culturally, I don’t see it ever happening in my lifetime.
No. I just sorta believe that every developed country in the world spends less than the US because a generation ago their health care costs inflated at x% and the US inflated at x+y%. Other than wishful thinking I see no reason to believe that transforming the system will magically correct this. I see lots of evidence (basically every government program) to believe that costs will go up and performance will decline.
Here are two anecdotes. Take them for what they are worth. I had to visit my eye doctor to have a “field of vision” test done. I also needed to have my routine eye exam. These could easily have been done in the same visit, but the doctor’s office would not schedule them that way because the insurance company would not have reimbursed them as two separate office visits. I had to take time off on another day to visit the doctor. It wasted my time, the person scheduling appointments, the person coding the procedure to submit to the insurance company, and the person at the insurance company processing the claims.
Another time I wanted to get a shingles shot. My local pharmacist could do it (relatively) cheaply, but my insurance company did not include them. Instead, I would need to have it done at a doctor’s office. But my primary care physician did not keep the vaccine on hand and I spent a few hours trying to find an in-network doctor that did. I ended up not getting it.
Two small cases of waste and absurdity, now multiply that by 280 million people. Say what you will about government bureaucrats controlling healthcare, right now we have the insurance industry acting as gate keepers. Why not switch insurance companies? It was pre-ACA and I had pre-existing conditions. Nothing major, but enough that no insurance company would take me on.
I’ll repeat it again Every Other Industrialized Country Has Healthcare That Covers Everyone, Has Better Outcomes, and is Cheaper.
By “every other government program” I guess you didn’t include Medicare.
This is a country that developed the atomic bomb and put a man on the moon, but for some reason we are too stupid to accomplish what every other industrialized country has done.
Surely it is a purview of friendship to tell you when you’re being stupid.
Are you calling me stupid in GD?
I’m not your friend.
I’m so glad that the government shutdown is over and SNAP is once again fully funded.
But Vermont ultimately decided not to go with single-payer. So, we never got to see these “savings” that were projected. And they’re a tiny, homogeneous state with strong democrat majorities politically. Even if they implemented single-payer, I don’t think it would mean much for the rest of the country.
If you want single-payer, you’ll need a larger state to pilot this, and maybe a state with a diverse population. Massachusetts piloted the ACA, and became the model for the nation. Can a state like California pilot some other way to get to UHC, either with a public option or higher subsidies?
I think the way forward currently is via the states. After the Trump administration attacks on the ACA, we’re starting to see blue states move forward with plans to expand coverage. I think that’s a good thing.
That was clearly the plural “you”, meaning *all *Americans who oppose something so damn obvious for reasons that make no sense.
Well, then you’ve won the debate. It’s always so convincing in politics when we tell people that disagree with us that they’re stupid. It always works out and sways them to our side. (eyes roll)
Read post 105, to which I was responding. There was no debate to be had.
I was responding to post #115, penned by Elvis. Not you.
Well, if that’s as far back as you want to go, okay.
You really need to explain the discrepancy between your last two sentences and the first ones.
You basically said (if I’m understanding you correctly) that UHC systems have cost growth of x% and US growth is x+y%. Then you state that if we change our system to match UHC systems our growth rate won’t revert to x%. Why not? What is so special about the US that we have to, perpetually, have a higher-than-average growth in health care spending (both private and public). This makes no sense to me at all.
You can argue, if you’d like, that we won’t get true “reduction” in spending (i.e. x won’t go negative). But surely you would agree that x% growth is better than x+y%, right? Especially when all of the data indicates that the cheaper options have as good or better results?
I guess the only possible explanation is that the US government is just so terrible at doing it’s job that it will inevitably do it worse than every other government on the planet. I suppose the evidence of the last month tends to back that up, but man that’s quite a pessimistic view of American Exceptionalism. MAGA, indeed.