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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 09 2019, @04:04PM (1 child)
We will never ever get medicare for all, not without a bloody revolution first.
The existing system is excellent at extracting wealth from the working class while giving them the illusion of choice and the oh-so-important Personal Responsibilty, and so it will never change by a parliamentary process.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 10 2019, @03:52AM
At the present, Medicare appears to be a lower cost system than the various options for people that are not able to use Medicare.
My idea of ~20 years ago was to slowly lower the age at which people are eligible for Medicare. Every year we lower the age by a year -- this year I can get Medicare when I'm 65, next year it's 64, etc. Change the rate if you want to go slower, wait two years before lowering the age by a year.
The advantages of a slow phase in include: Slowly increase the workload on the Medicare bureaucracy, with a good manager (there are some in gov't), automation and other productivity improvements could keep the head count from growing as fast as the increased number of people covered by Medicare. Meanwhile, the insurance companies would have plenty of time to figure out how to get into another business, or close down gracefully, no need to put all those workers out on the street all at once.