Brits freak out when told the price of health care in the United States

Yes. The correct bill would leave out the insurers and everyone else gets to have healthcare.

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NPR did a nice segment on this earlier this week. Even for Americans with employer-provided healthcare, the median deductible went from $0 to $6000 for a family of 4 in the past 20 years.

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No, this is a lie, a regressive talking point, and part of a narrative that has been thoroughly debunked. One part of the American system in which we live is paying for things that benefit us all (despite the efforts of regressives to destroy them): clean air, drinkable water, safe roads, public schools, first responders, caring for the sick and elderly, etc. Health care for everyone is part of that contract. If you’re truly concerned about the “steep tax increases to middle-class and higher Americans,” the focus of your outrage ought to be the fucking military.

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Because if you call the police and they take a bad person off the street, then that’s good for me as well. If the fire department puts out a fire at your house, then the fire will not spread to my house. Your health problems are yours alone, though, so good luck. My thoughts and prayers will be with you, neighbor.

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Then doesn’t it just get deducted from their “estate”? (Assuming they did leave anything behind.)

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You are, of course, correct… about what you pay for yourself. There are also millions of people with inadequate or non-existent healthcare that also need to be paid for. And that must (and does in any rational system) come from the tax base, which means substantial tax increases to pay for that.

And that is how it should be.

This idea that somehow Americans should be able to enjoy all the benefits of socially progressive policies but still have a middle-class and upper-middle-class that is wealthier than almost anywhere in the world implies that the rest of the world makes sacrifices only because they’re idiots. That in America alone, no real sacrifice needs to be made.

Social justice doesn’t come for free. It comes because citizens sacrifice. And pretending they don’t feels a lot like the “chicken-hawking” of social justice. I want social justice, but only if I don’t have to help pay for it.

Change occurs when people are willing to sacrifice immediate wealth for a better society. The job of progressives is not spread lies about how there is no cost. It’s to persuade people that the costs are worth it. Because they are.

(Look, I understand that politicians have to lie and pretend trade-offs don’t exist. But when you are at the point of having pretend there is no costs or trade-off in a forum where everyone agrees on the same goal, you’re reaching communist politburo of unreality. And calls of bad faith because of disagreements? Really? What are we here, Stalinists writ tiny?)

Yes. I’m concerned that somehow that steep tax increases are considered verboten.

There are a hell of a lot of expensive things that America (and Canada) desperately need to improve the life of those at the bottom of the heap. And we, the middle-class should be paying a lot more in order to provide them. The idea that this seems inconceivable to many Americans on the left is an indication that we progressives have a lot of work to do.

But in relative terms, there really is no cost, as in, extra cost. No “sacrifice.”

Americans know that health care now isn’t free, and that it’s actually really expensive. Most just can’t put 2 and 2 together and realize that although universal health care could mean higher taxes for some, the actual cost would be lower because it’s not being run for billionaires’ profit anymore. They also don’t tend to realize how wasteful and unnecessary their empire’s military budget is. Shift half that to healthcare for all and…

Well, like I say, few Americans can even imagine such things.

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Brits freak out when told the price of health care in the United States

Just imagine how much us Americans freak out when told the price of health care in the United States.

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All of which cleverly ignores the fact we’re already paying for an arrangement that costs us more and gives us less. (See above.)

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Which ones? Prior to GOP dismantling of Obamacare, the coverage rate for Americans was over 90%. Those in poverty are already covered by Medicaid, the elderly by Medicare, and Veterans by the VA. The few remaining are (very expensively) covered by the government when they get wheeled into the ER in a crisis because they didn’t have preventative care.

I don’t see a “substantial tax increase” there. And that’s without trimming the health insurance industry’s 15% skim off the top.

ETA: Progessive politicians aren’t the ones lying here. You are when you say costs will somehow increase.

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A lot of very bright minds have looked very hard at how to reduce American healthcare costs, and the best they’ve achieved is to stifle the growth. Universal medicare in the US cannot wait until the mythical time that healthcare costs can sharply reduced. All people need coverage now. And if that means increasing taxes, then that’s what it takes.

(I’m deeply pessimistic about American’s willingness to control healthcare costs. Perhaps the best chance was widespread adoption of HMOs (which is essentially the Canadian healthcare approach - one unappealable HMO). What happened? HMOs were attacked (by the left!) because the (very real) suffering of individuals whose care wasn’t covered was deemed more important that containment of costs that could make universal healthcare much, much easier.)

My analogy is when comparing Canadian vs. American healthcare is Corolla vs. Lexus. The drive outcome is almost identical, but for the Americans that can afford it (most of the $100K+), they do get more amenities (lots of mostly (but not always) useless testing, little in the way of wait times, some get access to treatments considered uneconomical in Canada, etc.)

Universal coverage with no tax increases requires those with Lexus insurance to pay the same and accept Corolla treatment. With the extra money saved, maybe you really could achieve healthcare for all without any additional healthcare spending. (Not really, but it would be a big step.)

However, as I said above, there’s no sign of that happening. I think the easier step towards universal healthcare is to put it right on the line. Lack of access to healthcare for a huge number of Americans is immoral and it is my duty and yours to pay more taxes so that they can have a similar level of healthcare to ours.

“Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country,”

No one has had the will to scuttle private health insurance. That is a prerequisite for any meaningful decrease in costs. There is simply no room and no need for a middleman in health care. It’s pure vampirism.

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Agreed.

No one has the political power to totally up-end the American healthcare system. There’s probably 50 million voters who are happy with the current system that would crucify you. So you work with what you have. People get to keep their outrageously overpriced system because they don’t want to give that up. Fine.

Instead, we make the case that every American deserves that healthcare. And none of this deductible or co-pay business. Which means, if we want a moral nation, people like me pay significantly more.

I’m sorry, I consider the enactment of Obamacare a near miracle and quite masterful, but do you really consider it an acceptable stand-in for universal health-care? It’s the kind of half-way solution you get when refuse to address the matter head-on. It’s probably the best that could be done if you weren’t going to significantly raise taxes, but I feel that kind of makes my point…

Nooooooooo! The point is, Americans are fucking fed up with private health insurers. Polls show 70% approval for M4A. The time is ripe to make the move. EVERYONE now news someone who has either died due to lack of coverage, refusal of their insurance to pay for life-saving therapy, or lived and been bankrupted by the bills - again, even while covered by what people consider “good” coverage.

Are you driving trollies with this shit? The point about Obamacare is to refute your assertion that there are very many Americans without insurance. There aren’t. We’re close to full (nominal) coverage. Thus, there isn’t going to be some huge increase in total health care cost with single-payer due to an increase in participation.

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Supply and demand is Econ 101.

With so many different for-profit insurance companies, prices get set high and then are modified based on how well each company haggles it down for each charge.

If there is one main payer (the government), it has the power to set the parameters. Still room for private insurance companies as well, but the competition for pricing is muted.

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Keep in mind that in the US we spend almost $11k on healthcare per capita. I have a four person household so my share of the healthcare costs would be $44k / year. How many people are in your household?

Even if a universal system were able to halve our healthcare spending, your bill might actually go up.

A big part of the problem is how much we spend on end-of-life care. It sucks but we need to make better decisions about letting very sick people die.

We could easily decimate the cost of most medicine. Insulin in Canada much cheaper than half as expensive as the US.

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Literally decimate? That would give us the least expensive healthcare in the developed world.

Pharmaceutical spending is around 12% of that $11,000 per capita spending. Cutting that in half would drop the per capita spending to about $10,000. Bigger changes are needed.

I doubt they meant that word literally, Mr. Pedant. Just like most people who use it.

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Speaking literally, “decimate” means “to remove 1/10th of”, and cutting our health care costs by 10% would probably not even do much to remove us from 1st place on the “most expensive health care” rankings. If insulin in Canada costs less than half what it does in the US (and it certainly does), you could easily decimate the cost of insulin in the US and have acres of space left to go before even getting close to matching what Canadians pay.

Perhaps you were under the mistaken impression that decimate means “to leave 10% behind”.

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