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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 Tokolosh on Tuesday April 09 2019, @02:49PM (1 child)
To reap the benefits of Medicare for all, the middlemen, administrators, bureaucrats, hangers-on and associated staff will have to go, together with their offices and parking spaces. Total US health care employment is 13 million, excluding self-employed. That is literally millions of people out of a job, not counting their associated daycare providers, home builders, plumbers, bankers, etc. According to the March 2019 Bureau of Labor Statistics (https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/ceshighlights.pdf) the US added nearly 400,000 health care jobs in the last 12 months. To reverse this trend and reach our goal will meet infinite resistance from entrenched incumbents protecting their turf.
We are doomed.
Costs (and prices) will not come down until each individual consumer of healthcare is strongly incentivized and empowered to drive them down. This will happen when they pay out of their own pockets, have transparency in prices, competition and the ability to take their business elsewhere. Currently, we have the opposite - someone else pays, you have no idea what the cost will be, and there is no competition. All of these problems are enabled or created by the government.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 09 2019, @04:05PM
There would be a reduction there, but there would also be a massive increase in productivity as a result of not having so many people being sick.
This whole lost jobs thing is a terrible basis for making decisions. There are ways around that, the most sensible being to go back to reducing the workweek like we used to do. The current 40 hour work week used to be a lot longer and cover more days of the week. But, back during a period of time where we weren't allowing the rich to buy politicians, there were measures that were put into place that made it expensive to employ people for more than 40 hours a week at the same company. We're now having people work multiple jobs to get over that limit because companies are againt buying politicians and not paying what work is worth.
There's also an awful lot of work that needs doing, that isn't currently being done. Things like fixing our embarrassing infrastructure.