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from the But-I-*like*-getting-50-different-invoices-for-one-hospital-stay dept.
There is an instinct among political pundits to confuse caution for practicality — an assumption that those who advocate for incremental change are being reasonable, while those pushing for bold reforms aren’t. This is seen most starkly in the debate around health care reform, despite the fact that the “practical” pushers of limited reform fail to address the real problems in our health care system.
We all recognize that the status quo isn’t working. We spend more per person than any other country on health care, but we aren’t getting any bang for our buck. We have lower life expectancy, higher infant mortality rates and more preventable deaths, and too many personal bankruptcies are due at least in part to medical bills.
[...]Time to get real. As an economist who has spent decades studying our health care system, I can tell you that Medicare for All advocates are the only ones who are being reasonable, because theirs is the only plan that will control health care costs while finally achieving universal coverage.
The problem with incremental plans, whether they are public options, buy-ins to Medicare or Medicaid, or pumping more money into subsidies in the Affordable Care Act's individual marketplace, is that they preserve the private health insurance system weighing down our health care. [...]they are leaving the main reason for our system’s dysfunction in place: the multipayer, for-profit financing model.
Commercial insurance companies are nothing more than middle men. They add no value to our system, but they do drive up costs with their bloated claims departments, marketing and advertising budgets and executive salaries. We pay for all of these things before a single dollar is spent on the delivery of care.
They also create extra costs for providers who need large administrative staffs to deal with billing systems, accounting for as much as $100,000 per physician.
Any plans short of Medicare for All leaves these costs in place. In other words, they leave hundreds of billions of dollars a year in savings on the table.
[...]Gerald Friedman, a health care and labor economist, is an economics professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst and the director of The Hopbrook Institute.
[Related]:
Democrats' promise of Medicare for All is remarkably misguided and unrealistic
Trump wants to drop a neutron bomb on Obamacare. Over to you, 2020 voters.
Take it from me, tweaks won't fix health care. Dems should focus on Medicare for All.
(Score: 1, Troll) by khallow on Tuesday April 09 2019, @02:13PM (4 children)
The problem with a free market system is that it stops working well when you break it. And the more you break it, the worse it gets. Nothing else is like that. Right?
Almost free markets don't require that. Perfect is the enemy of the good enough.
It's not much of a problem really since the presumption isn't relevant to the free market system. Surely, you could come with serious problems.
So... we could go back to the things that worked in the Industrial Revolution for improving living standards like fewer burdens on job creation and avoid some of things that aren't working now like vast entitlement schemes? Am I getting that right?
Such things as a) greater internal efficiency, and b) offering vastly better services to the users. But then again, one doesn't need increasing profits in order to have profits. Privatization works even when a service merely provides more value than it consumes.
So... public system can be run better than private ones, but they won't because of the new Minister of Health. I think you're hitting some of the highlights of the pro-free market side in that quote.
(Score: 3, Informative) by NewNic on Tuesday April 09 2019, @05:46PM (3 children)
The "Free market" brought us Insulin that costs many diabetes sufferers thousands of dollars per month.
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 09 2019, @06:29PM (2 children)
Good thing you used scare quotes there. Someone might have otherwise thought you were speaking of an actual free market. Remember my first sentence about breaking free markets? This is the sort of thing you get when you do that.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by NewNic on Tuesday April 09 2019, @07:09PM (1 child)
So tell us how to fix the non-true Scotsman's "Free Market".
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 09 2019, @10:46PM