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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: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday April 09 2019, @02:36PM (5 children)
We already know the problem with that. Those people go to the ER. All of us paying out of pocket and/or with private insurance end up bearing the cost of the uninsured. So why not make them get insured?
Or to you propose that the ER simply lets them die in the street? Oh, sorry, you cannot come into the ER without the ability to pay.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Tuesday April 09 2019, @03:16PM (3 children)
The underlying assumption in that question is that individual "them" can afford to get insured.
The massively unequal wealth distribution in the USA undermines that assumption to the point of total destruction.
I know two people who have unrevised hernias because the costs of fixing same are unmanageable. I know one guy who is nearly blind in one eye and can't afford the surgery to get that fixed either. I know a lady who got breast cancer, went ahead and got treatment for it, and then was forced into bankruptcy because, of course, the costs were far too high for her to bear. Before she hooked up with me, my SO had to choose between medical care for herself, or feeding her children. You can guess how that went.
The individual pay-to-play medical care system is broken if the goal is actually to take care of people (it isn't... it's to make a profit.) The only way to fix it is to (1) make the goal a healthy nation and (2) for the government, through taxation, to assume the costs — as an inherent requirement of a properly functional nation that sees to it that its citizens are healthy... and educated, etc.
We definitely should take care of everyone as needed and bear the costs nationally. This is the best approach because age, disease and accident are no respecters whatsoever of a person's financial state, except in that people with fewer resources may be under greater stress, living in poorer environments, eating more poorly, etc... and so in more need, rather than less.
And all of that is without even addressing the massive amounts of entirely non-medically related skimming being done by insurance companies, who incorporate the actual "death panels" that refuse care to the insured (and the virtual death panel that creates a care deficit for those who cannot afford care under the current system.)
--
Pollen: when flowers can't keep it in their plants.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday April 09 2019, @03:42PM (2 children)
I agree. If a person's financial state causes health problems, then either the rich pay for their increased health care, or they have incentive to lift those people's economic status.
But (some) rich people consider themselves to be better than everyone else. They are made of something actually better than what we are made of. They (at least some) believe it is the breeding of their superior stuff rather than nurture.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 09 2019, @04:17PM (1 child)
FTFY
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 09 2019, @08:40PM
FTFY
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 09 2019, @03:23PM
Your taxes have already been paying for this. It has been going on for decades and is a rounding error. Start thinking quantitatively, almost no healthcare cost is attributable to ER care.