Right, you don’t want your taxes to go up, but that’s not what I’m curious about. I’m wondering what your insurance coverage is , that you do 'tbwantbto give up for UHC, which is his I read your thread title?
{emphasis added}
Linden Arden, are you spending more than 10.6% of your gross income on healthcare?
You had best pray that you don’t ever lose your job, or you’ll find out exactly how much your health insurance actually costs when you try to get COBRA and pay the full amount that your employer’s been paying for you. You’re very lucky they’re paying as much as they are, but don’t fool yourself into thinking it’s not costing a lot of money. You just don’t see it. Expect it to be costing between $750 to $1000 per month, per member, for a silver-level policy. More for a gold or platinum policy. And more the older you are.
Man, my auto-correct is going crazy. Let’s try that again.
Right, you don’t want your taxes to go up, but that’s not what I’m curious about. I’m wondering what your insurance coverage is, that you don’t want to give up for UHC, which is how I read your thread title?
And also, don’t forget that most of the expensive patients ( people over 65 ,people on disability and people that are too sick to work) are getting their healthcare via a government program anyway ( or a possibly subsidized ACA policy) Employer based insurance is frequently cheaper because they can exclude people that are too sick to work. I guess you get COBRA for a year before you have to find a private plan ( probably an ACA plan ,the other ones won’t take you ) or go on government assistance.)
I’m not saying private plans get out of covering serious illnesses - they do end up covering family members of insured and they cover a lot of patients during the first year of a serious illness, if the patient can afford to buy it via COBRA. But the ability to throw someone that can’t work off their health insurance and onto the government dime is another the way the public sector subsidizes private industry.
And the insurance companies really do care. Our insurer used to audit the payroll at my workplace pretty much every year ( they were a small business with a lot of unhealthy employees and several people with seriously ill family members).
I lost my insurance after their auditor determined I didn’t meet their definition of an employee ( I was a contract worker but I had self-incorporated). No warning, no grace period. Which was kind of funny because I was the one person in the place that never used my insurance, I hadn’t filed a claim in 2 years. My premiums were pure profit to them.
The additonal question to ask is “whatever that percentage is, does the cover continue indefintely if you find yourself out of work?” because that’s a key feature.
I’m not sure how that would play out in the US, because we’d have to see what type of UHC plan we get. I’m more interested in knowing what % of doctors would stop their practices if we went to single-payer vs if we used another way to get to UHC. It’s well-known that in the US, Medicare & Medicaid don’t pay as much as private insurance. If we went to Single Payer, some doctors would see a decrease in payments (likely, anyway). Would they accept that?
Like any service or commercial concern the equation comes down to income v outgoings. Would a switch to UHC also make it cheaper to run their practices?
As for “accepting” it, why would it matter? In all UHC systems in the first world that I know of, Doctors are paid, at least, a solid middle class wage. There is no reason to imagine that the USA would be any different and I can’t imagine why there’d be a shortage of people lining up to train and work as doctors.
Yes.
The employer portion is paid by me since it is part of my compensation package. The fact that my employer withholds it for tax purposes doesn’t change the fact that “benefits” are part of my total compensation just as “salary” is.
Do you mean “inexpensive” as in the total costs are low? Because if so, I’d be interested in how much your employer is actually paying on it, and how much the government is chipping in in tax breaks.
Or do you mean inexpensive to you personally? Because I really doubt it is as inexpensive to you as the healthcare of the UK, which is free at the point of delivery or Norway where a persons maximum medical costs are capped at $ 300 per year.
As others have pointed out, the over-65s who are currently on medicare cost far more than the average person. Bodies fall apart as we age, sadly. I once calculated that they cost roughly 4x that of under-65s. The group of people who are uninsured and still alive is probably marginally healthier than the others as they don’t include people who are kept alive through medical care. For long.
Why do you think the laws of economics work differently for you? Healthcare in the UK costs 25 % less in taxes than the current setup costs you in taxes, and they cover everyone and do not charge people for it. Your current system means you pay more in taxes, to the government, for healthcare than most other developed nations. Unlike them, the tax-payers in the US are not in the group that receive any healthcare for their money.
What are they going to do, drive a bus?
For starters, their pay could end up going up to the level of some UHC nations, but even if not, what is the alternative to medical practice once you spent all those years in college on a medical degree?
A national system would also make it easier to certify physicians from abroad, easing the shortage of doctors in the US
By adding 120 million people onto my tax burden my costs will skyrocket. I want to keep this as a macro discussion.
As a middle income working stiff I pay for 100% of my health insurance (remember “benefits” are part of my compensation package) and we (workers) pay 100% of current Medicare taxes.
MFA will ADD 120 million people to our payroll tax burden. I expect my cost to double based on current law. Yet I have a lying politician who claims my “cost” will go down by adding those 120 million people. And she won’t provide any detail to support such an outlandish claim.
Trump has lied some 12,000 times according to the Washington Post. But he hasn’t told one that big yet.
I have spent some time trying to get into the heads of Americans on this subject, and try to understand how they see things. Like thos who automatically assume that there is a bureaucratic layer between doctors and patients who must approve things because that is the only way they know.
Look:
A) is the costs of delivering healthcare. Surgery, drugs, bandages, MRIs, doctors hours, nurses, etc, etc, etc.
B) is the cost of gatekeeping, filtering out people who are not to get healthcare, get reduced healthcare or do not get everything covered. Rationing it. It induces insurance agents, stock dividends, billing, chasing down payments, credit-checking, liaising and negotiating between hospitals and insurers, arbitration, appeals, time spent on forms, etc, etc, etc, etc. Things that are non-existent or more rudimentary in most other first world nations.
US healthcare costs are the total costs of** A **+ B
I think people are looking a bit too hard on the costs of A, and don’t really realize how much B totals up to. They assume that B is so much smaller than A that its negligible in the total costs.
Thats not true. B is about equal to** A**. In other words, the cost of the US rationing measures in healthcare are now as large as the costs of delivering healthcare. People believe A is so large that they are desperately afraid of the extra costs they think they would get if** B** was relaxed even slightly.
Whereas when you consider that most people in the US have healthcare of some sort, the actual costs of rationing have grown much larger than what it’d cost to just treat everyone.
Why do you think other nations have less of a tax burden towards health care, when everyone is on health care?
Maybe you should ask Sen. Warrren if her plan includes raising or rescinding the current $132,900 wage limit for FICA tax. Betcha it does. If you add in the additional contributions, that changes your arithmetic considerably. And the wage market will inevitably adjust to new conditions “on the ground;” that’s how the Invisible Hand functions.
Or maybe you should look at how … gee, literally every other wealthy, developed nation has managed to both reduce costs and improve outcomes with a single-payer system. If you want to take a “macro” view.
If a picture’s worth a thousand words, this cartoon should cover whatever else I had to say: It Could Happen Here! (Matt Bors)
Services cost much more here in the USA.
And cutting the salaries/costs for those services is electoral doom.
That limit does not apply to Medicare taxes today.
And Sen Warren doesn’t have a MFA plan - just a vague promise.
Wait, screech to a halt, record scratch… That withholding is NOT the employer-paid portion of the insurance premium. That is YOUR portion. Your employer also pays an equal or higher amount IN ADDITION to what they pull out of your checks.
Services cost more because you are paying for the whole system. The wages of healthcare insurance people, hospital employees who deal with insurers, people who work in billing… all of that is rolled into the bills.
And physicians or specialists actually get paid more than in the US in Australia, Switzerland, and the Nederlands. They still cover everyone on far less money than the US spends.
Whats more, there is about 1 million physicians in the US. At $ 218 k per year, the total costs are 218 billion. Maybe a 100 billion above average, and 50 billion less than the high salaries nations, adjusted for population. US overspending on medical care is about 1.6 trillion. Salary differences are far too small to make up the difference.
The US gets charged more across the board not because you pay people more, but because you pay more people. You simply have a lot of people in gatekeeping doing jobs that other nations don’t see the point of.
Both portions are MY portions. The EMPLOYER withholding is part of my compensation package and that is how it works for everyone.
Since there is less total medical care being performed than we need, if we instituted UHC the demand for it would go up rather than down, so not only would we need to entice otherwise capable people to enter the field with good pay, we’d need to increase the output of doctor’s colleges as well.
Furthermore, probably because of the current lack of physicians, we currently import a lot of them from abroad. If they only got paid as much as they do in other UHC nations, some of them would choose to go to one of the other ones instead.
But these are small details compared to the huge wastefulness of the current American system. We could easily pay doctors more than they’re currently making and come out ahead since every doctor’s office could lay off one or more clerical staff, and that’s before you count the insurance companies themselves.