Yeah, hi, the $370 that comes out of my paycheck every month, as well as the $2,000/year personal and $4,000/year family deductibles and the $250/year prescription drug deductible on my better-than-what-most-people-get-for-the-money plan would beg to differ with you on that. I’m still paying for a kidney ultrasound I got two years ago because it cost me over $1,000 and I don’t have a whole lot of wiggle room for that kind of nonsense. Hell, I had a mole frozen off last year, a procedure which required two spritzes of liquid nitrogen and about 2 minutes of my doctor’s time, and it cost me $150. Paying through the nose is not nonsense, it’s everyday life.
And even if employers at other companies are more generous when it comes to what percentage they’ll pay for employees and their families, that’s still hundreds upon hundreds of dollars every month that those employees are not getting as income because it’s being funneled as a “benefit” into our craptastic private insurance system.
Further, if you remove the burden on employers to provide quality health care for their employees, you eliminate a huge source of financial strain on businesses (especially small businesses). While the Republican magical trickle-down thinking that all of that “benefit” money would be converted into increased take-home pay for employees is probably nonsense based on, well… all of recorded history, I don’t think many companies would be able to reasonably claim that they have to claw back all of that suddenly-freed-up cash for the business or its executives.
And I would like to reiterate my point that unless you raised my taxes by three hundred percent, I would be paying less with new taxes and universal access to care than I am currently paying for private insurance. Not even counting the bills for services rendered, my current access to the health care market through my insurer will cost me a minimum of $4,400 this year (and that excludes the money my employer spends on me). Every doctor’s visit is another $20 (or $40, because my insurer is being a complete dickwaffle about treating my primary care provider as a primary care provider right now). Every prescription, of which there are many, is at least another $10. CPAP supplies cost me almost $300 for two months of supplies if I stretch them out.
Under absolutely no sane universal coverage program would any of this cost even remotely this much, and indeed, many countries around the world manage to provide free at point of service care to their entire citizenry for less than what we spend on Medicare. We’re the richest most prosperous most productive country on the god damned planet (or so our politicians keep telling me), so why can we not have the same things that everyone else takes for granted, like not being bankrupted by going to the hospital?
As for keeping Medicare solvent in its current form, I have one extremely simple solution, and Rich People Hate Me For It: eliminate the $127,200 cap on the FICA tax. Done.
Canada is a massively popular bogeyman on the right for the dangers of socialized medicine, and even Canadians will concede that their system has its problems. But the thing is, Canadians are also by and large more satisfied with their care, and they have better health care outcomes than the US while spending dramatically less money per capita (47% less, to be precise). They look at us with our $2,000 ambulance bills and our hospital-supplied $40 tylenols and our revolutionary GoFundMe-powered system for paying for insulin like we’ve got three damn heads, and for good fucking reason. And if you want to point out that Canada has wait times that are above the international norm, it’s disingenuous to do so without bringing up how the US fairs, especially for care from primary care providers, and even more especially in comparison to basically every other country with universal health care access.
Spoiler alert: we’re not doing that great either.
(You want to be on the left of each of those charts. The US is nowhere close, and the only country we’re better than on same-day/next-day care is Canada.)
