I didn’t say cut healthcare; I said eliminate insurance and go to a cash for services model. That will increase healthcare, because the actual cost of not supporting the middlemen will be cheaper than copays are right now. When an office visit costs me $100 with my Cadillac insurance policy, something’s wrong, because I can walk into a private hospital without insurance in another country and pay less than that. And it’s not doctor’s wages; it’s the insurance bullshit.
All the ones with UHC have already done it and are 33% less than our spending levels. Because they have a different model of health care. There’s no need to make up phantom impossibilities.
To be more accurate, they had a system in place to control or moderate increases in costs before the explosion in expensive high-tech medicine, and the increase in life expectancy, rather than having to cut an already high cost.
When the British NHS was founded, antibiotics were just coming into widespread use, major advances in surgery like hip replacements hadn’t been thought of, (let alone advanced heart surgery), and the major public health issues were poor housing and industrial/occupational disease and injuries (no-one then really understood about smoking, and after the best part of 10 years of food rationing, obesity wasn’t an issue). People generally accepted that death could come from a range of conditions that are now treatable, so didn’t survive into lengthy and increasing frailty and all its complexities, or into extended battles with cancer. They even thought that, once the backlog of previously untreated conditions was dealt with (prolapses in women was a commonly cited example), demand and costs would automatically fall. By the time cost pressures started to build up, there was already a long-established culture of cutting one’s cost according to the cloth, waiting one’s turn and trusting the professionals, and it was understood that increasing provision meant increasing taxes (or cutting one meant cutting the other).
No, but since a 1% increase in income predicts a 1.8% increase in medical spending, if any other country got its economy together enough to become as rich as the US I bet some of them could grow their healthcare spending enough.
Enough… to what? Be stupid? Yeah, they can all grow their healthcare spending enough to be as stupid as us.
They can start by saying “we should pay American prices for drugs and devices.” Follow it up with “hire a bunch of non medical people to push papers around.”
Maybe they can really ramp it up by finding a way to bankrupt their citizens with medical expenses and make them doubly worried about getting sick. Technically, that doesn’t increase healthcare spending… it’s just the American Way™.