How about increasing the tax on the poor so that they pay things for some other poor? While the extra wealthy people don’t use the whatever service (like universal health care) that comes out of it? This is not a matter of “what can you do with it” but a matter of whether you should do it.
Collect merely an additional $1000 – chump change – from each American household with below median income (losers who don’t deserve what they have anyway) and you’d raise enough to cut the tax rate on the rich from an average 20.0% all the down to 19.9% !! Think of the Jobs that would be Created.
Even better would be to collect $2000 per poor person, not just $1000 per household. Organ harvesting might become big business, further boosting GDP. The personal services industries would doubtless also get a big boost, and distinguished Congresscritters would no longer need to patronize gold-digging sluts to pursue their hobbies. Win-win.
No, I do not agree that our infrastructure is in trouble. Since 1989 the number of bridges classified as deficient has dropped 42%, the amount of interstates which were classified as congestion has been cut in half. The rate of highway fatalities has been cut in half.
There are some places such as California where roads are awful, but overall it is not a big problem. The American Society of Civil Engineers puts out reports that are covered by a gullible media that says the infrastructure is terrible to try to lobby for more money for its members, but a unbiased looks says that infrastructure is better than ever and improving all the time.
Drug spending only accounted for 9.3% of total healthcare spending. Negotiating it in half would only get you 7.7% of the way to the total needed. Cutting spending on doctors in half would get you 18.7% of the way to the 1.7 trillion. If the government can’t beat the drug lobby, there is no way they could touch the doctor’s lobby.
The US system consumes 17.1 % of GDP on providing healthcare to most US citizens. That is 2 900 billion. It is also 9 230 $ per person.
The average UHC system in the developed world consumes 9.3 % of GDP, to provide healthcare to everyone. How much that is per person varies as the GDP of countries varies, for high-GDP countries such as Norway or Switzerland it is a high number low- GDP ones works out to a lower number.
However, it is just over half of what the US spends.
About 8 % of US spending is public spending. And 9 % private. Government money sourced from tax dollars. That is a total of 1 400 billion dollars. Or 4330 $ per person. Under the US system, this covers 28 % of the population through Medicare, medicaid, the VHA, IHA etc. Now you may have noticed that those 8 % is not too far off the 9.3 % most firts world nations pay for their entire healthcare systems, public and private together. (Yes, that 9.3 % include thriving private sectors)
And given that the US GDP per person is a bit larger than most nations, in fact citizens of most countries with UHC pay less tax for healthcare than Americans do.
For comparison the US military budget is about 5 % of GDP:
That is how much cheaper single payer is.
PS: Healthcare worker salaries is a very small part of the difference.
This matches your cite, which has about 40% of bridges totally deficient, structurally deficient, or obsolete.
In 2010 congestion had decreased greatly - thanks to the recession, which took millions off the roads. It happened here also. That is indeed a reason to vote Republican - increase unemployment and thus decrease traffic jams.
The chart in your site goes back to 2000, and has a 10% improvement at best. A bigger improvement must have happened during the Clinton Administration. I’m sure Obama’s stimulus pacakage helped some also.
So the experts don’t agree that all is well. It can be with some more money. An increase in the gas tax would do it also, but spending money from the 1% would be less regressive.
Never said that cutting drug prices would solve the problem. Grim Render covered what would quite nicely. And I’m unaware that the Bush Administration fought the drug companies about price negotiation. IIRC, that was an original part of the deal. Happens when you care about business more than people.
As for doctors, the AMA lobby, even when nastier than today, can be beaten, which is why we have Medicare.
I am not shocked that the American Road and Transportation Builders Association thinks more money should be spent on American Roads and Transportation Builders.
As my cite showed there was a 10% improvement just since 2000 and I don’t think it included the stimulus package. If you look further back you can see that the improvement is even greater. Structurally deficient does not mean in danger of collapse but merely that expansion would improve traffic flow. The same report classifies only 1.3% as in significant disrepair.
Per capita miles driven has fallen for nine straight years suggesting that we don’t need to spend as much money on roads and infrastructure as we used to.
No one is disputing that Healthcare in America is very expensive. However, you cannot wave a wand and import another country’s healthcare system. In order to get from our current system to a single payer that costs 9.3% of GDP you have to cover 72% of the population with an additional cost of only 1.3% of GDP. You don’t get there through negotiating drug costs and banning tv commercials for drugs. You have to massively cut spending on hospitals, doctors, nurses, the elderly, diagnostic tests, and pretty much every type of healthcare spending.
If you think that is even remotely possible I refer you to the Medicare doc fix debate in which Congress has on a bipartisan basis refused to cut reimbursement to doctors treating Medicare patients. If Congress refused to cut doctor’s Medicare reimbursement 4.8% there is absolutely no way they are going to vote to cut the entire Medical systems reimbursement in half.
A country where refusing to provide birth control pills to college coeds for free constitutes a war on women is not going to be able to cut costs through the political process.
Thus the only way to get to single payer in the US is to come up with around 1.8 trillion dollars of new taxes.
Yes, I noted that infrastructure was improved under Clinton. It is not like crumbling infrastructure is a law of nature, it just comes from time and inadequate resources. Clearly the worst infrastructure gets taken care of first, but the obsolete infrastructure is going to be worst before too long.
As for miles driven, what is the range of your numbers? If it is the same as your cite, ending at 2010, I quite believe the number, since fewer people employed leads to fewer miles driven per capita.
In the Bay Area the average driver pays about $700 a year in repairs due to poor roads. Putting money in infrastructure - which is what we’re talking about - has rewards beyond more employment.
And the reason I brought up infrastructure is that it is more likely to be stimulative than giving checks to people (Bush did that and it didn’t work very well) or pumping it into healthcare, which we see can be improved at lower cost.
While you correctly say that healthcare reform will be hard to get past Republicans in Congress, that’s not an argument against healthcare reform. It is an argument against Republicans. And lobbyists.
What’s more likely to happen is that they will increase your taxes by $1200 and provide you with $1000 worth of health care for $900 while “squandering” the other $300 to provide health care to some stranger who doesn’t have enough income to pay more taxes, frikking freeloaders. And what’s worse is that their health care will be just as good as yours despite the fact that you are a producer and they are a leech. Shouldn’t they be made to grovel just a little bit to achieve the same level of health care that you get? Otherwise there would be no incentive to being rich. Right?
The numbers I cited for miles driven per capita were from 2004-2013. The trend started before the recession.
California has one of the worst road systems in the country, but it is not for lack of investment. California spend half a million dollars per mile of state controlled roads. That is three times the average of all the other states. In fact California has already implemented much of your plan, taxing the rich at the highest rates in the country, spending triple the average per road mile, and yet the unemployment rate is 14.5% higher than the country as a whole, while still having one of the worst road systems in the country.
The problem is not Republicans but democracy. All Democrats know that as soon as they propose doubling the income tax or cutting health care spending in half, there will cease to be a Democrat party at the national level. This is why every state that tried to set up universal health care backed down as soon as they saw the bill and no serious attempts at single payer has been attempted at the national level, instead of the Rube Goldberg machine that is Obamacare.