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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 Wednesday April 10 2019, @12:47AM
The way capitalist libertarians measure the size of government tends to either miss the point¹ or is totally asinine².
¹ I don't think anybody is seriously suggesting that more bureaucrats is a good thing. However, the libertarian analysis tends to be blind to corporate bureaucracy, so it is incomplete.
² Measuring the size of government by the amount of wealth it "redistributes" while totally ignoring that the wealth the worker produces has already once been redistributed away from him by capitalism itself before the government can redistribute it again into social programs.
The problem with capitalism is alienation from the worker of the value he produces. Marxism (or some synthesis of Marxism with anarchist mutualism) is a better way to implement what capitalist libertarians are always claiming minarchist capitalism will deliver.
Brush aside the wishful thinking of the Libertarian Party, Republican Party, and Democratic Party and actually analyze the emergent behavior of capitalism. If you're not certain how to begin your analysis, I'd suggest starting a game of Monopoly. Observe what happens as the game progresses from early stage at the beginning, through the middle game, to the late stage with the endgame.
The Libertarian Party blames the emergent behaviors of capitalism on a "big gubmit" bogeyman. The Republican Party blames the emergent behaviors of capitalism on a "immigrants! darkies! mooooooslims!" bogeyman. The Democratic Party blames the emergent behaviors of capitalism on a "white men oppressors!" bogeyman. None of them get it right because they cannot admit that capitalism, for all the good it's done the world, is a fundamentally flawed system when it reaches the endgame.