UHC: Has to be affordable, high-quality, and also *not* have long wait times

[Grim_Render]

@Kearsen1

Um no, we are out of pocket the $700/month. The rest is covered by my wife’s employer currently (the State)
But for the purpose of what this discussion was about, was the determine how much money the State or the Feds have to have to make a workable UHC system. If they took that money that the employers already pay and the money that individuals pay, then what?

What we as a people would hate to have happen (and which already did happen with the Affordable Act) was that the individual picked up a lot more of the tab.

I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation in another thread a while back:

@Grim_Render

You can do a rough back of the envelope calculation pretty easily. Medicare enrolls 55.5 million people (2015) and has a budget of 700 billion dollars. But the overwhelming number of medicare enrollees are over 65, a group that is 4x as expensive in healthcare terms as the average under-65. So you’d need about 835 billion more to cover everyone.

However, you wouldn’t need Medicaid anymore, they’d be on Medicare. Thats 582 billion (2015). So you’d need to come up with 253 billion.

But wait! You would not need the VHA. They’d all be on medicare. Thats 199 Billion (2019)- So it’d cost 54 billion.

**Except! **You might not need the IHS, depending on how you set it up. So thats 6 billion. Now you need 48 billion.

**Hold on! **You could cut CHIP, thats an additional 12 billion. So now you need 36 billion. (I believe you should still keep the childrens healthcare free though, so maybe not cut that?)

So on the order of 36 - 48 billion. Using your numbers of 138 million workers, you’d be adding about 260 -350 $ in taxes per person per year. (Feel free to check my math, its really late here and I’ve been drinking.)

**Only we’re not done! **Currently out-of-pocket expenses are 365 billion. You wouldn’t need most of them any more. So your average taxpayers total expenses are lower by 1150 before he gets the 300 extra tax bill.

Furthermore! Private health insurance is 1184 billion per year. You won’t need anywhere near as much as that. Thats a further reduction of 3 700 per citizen. More per working person of course, about 8500 Employers can use that on more investment, increased profits, research or expanding and creating more jobs.

Now let us check the numbers… Today you spend 10 700 per person on healthcare. Under this setup you'd spend 4 800 per person, plus whatever extra already covered people decided to spend on insurance and out of pocket, since medicare does not pay every cent of the bill. So maybe 6000 - 6500 $ per person ?

And it turns out that 6 000 is pretty average for a nation with the US GDP per person. By the magic of Christmas, it turns out that the laws of economics work the same for everyone!

These numbers were on expanding Medicare, but they do serve to illustrate a point: Currently, US government spending on health care is about as much as it costs to run a full UHC system for everyone. It just doesn’t manage to cover everyone due to an incredibly inefficient setup with multiple systems.