Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/08/21/countries-arent-businesses.html
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It looks so simple. Health insurance companies can go to hell.
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Not to mention the huge benefit to worker productivity, never having to waste another second on hold with a health insurance company. I’ve had to take a half-day off before just to straighten out some red tape so my wife could get a much-needed treatment to be covered. I swear a large part of their business model relies on people in need of care simply giving up.
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As someone currently experiencing… “issues”… with their health insurance company, I’d like nothing more.
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But that represents a net transfer of wealth to the undeserving! Where are the job creators in this scenario?
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Preferably in stocks…pilloried.
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More data.
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Wow… right. It doesn’t distinguish between the undeserving poor and the worthy poor! Moral fail! What about those who deserve to die, poxy and alone, in a ditch?
And do we have enough ditches?
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I have not seen anyone who was not dismayed/confused/aggravated by their health insurance companies. Elderly patients have a lot of difficulty to navigate the system. But I wonder how universal healthcare would work out. Retirees now have to pay about 150$/month for Medicare after retirement. Would universal healthcare cost 150$ for people who still work? Or would it be a certain percentage of income? Or would it be just a nominal payment? How the Koch analysis calculated the premiums?
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The biggest benefit to universal healthcare is that the overall cost of employment goes down even with marginally higher taxes since now businesses who offer health insurance as a benefit won’t have to deal with group policy changes or bargaining on premiums and other things (as my employer has done three times in the three years I’ve been with them). It means they just pay a tax to one provider (the government) and the rest is handled by the individuals in question (setting up appointments, paying co-pays, etc). It completely stream lines billing and the over all bureaucracy. And with computers helping out much of the billing process can be handled better and fraud managed better through forensic accountants instead of hundreds of different insurance providers with varying degrees of bargaining power with respect to the price of medicines and procedures. So I can’t see a down side beyond the insurance industry might shed some jobs or repurpose data entry folks for some other industries.
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Worthy poor? What are you, a Democrat?
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I’m reasonably confident that the government would rather spend money paying people to dig more ditches than spend the same amount of money (or less) actually preventing the need for them.
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Mind you, this study was done by the Cock… er, I mean Koch Bros. There are other studies that show significantly more savings than just 2 Trillion out of 32.6 trillion. That’s roughly only a 6% savings. Administrative and billing costs alone would save much more than that.
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With their assets seized, and their children made wards of the state.
There will be some jobs lost there for sure, but a big part of the health care industry—the folks handing claims and records, etc.—will still be there, effectively just government contractors.
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There’s been some research that suggests over half of the cost of US healthcare consists of the money spent servicing the insurance industry. In other words, go to single payer and you get the total healthcare spend cut in half. Can’t find the source at the moment. Anyone else want to take a crack at it?
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I’ve wondered about this myself. Surely for a lot of businesses, being relieved of the obligation to provide healthcare would be a huge advantage.
However, providing healthcare puts the employer in a stronger position relative to employees who might consider quitting (even more so before Obamacare gave us automatic coverage for all pre-existing conditions, and it will be so again after that provision is knocked down).
It’s still hard for me to see this as a net gain for employers, but it does counterbalance the cost to some extent.
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It’s tough to say, there’s a lot of long lived races in the cosmos - the immortals of Titan can be a problem.
The actual macro-economic bookkeeping for Medicare-for-all, then, is this:
1. Uncle Sam spends $3.3 trillion to pay for America’s health services;
2. U.S. families and businesses save $3.3 trillion by not having to spend it for their health-care;
3. The health-care industry earns $3.3 trillion by providing services;
4. The U.S. financial sector owns $3.3 trillion in treasury bond “savings accounts.”
Bernie Sanders / Warren and crowd are drinking the good stuff tonight, count me in…
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You can stop. The people who actually need to be convinced will not read anything longer than a bumper sticker. The analysis is correct, for-profit insurance companies are the absolute worst and none of it will matter because MAGA!!! Until somehow sanity is returned to our country, this is a lost cause.
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