Thank you for saying this! It is a cost of our current system that never makes the debates - the endless hours spent searching for and choosing the insurance provider, and then the endless hours spent dealing with them if you are unfortunate enough to need healthcare beyond the very basic maintenance appointments. Any discussions of the costs of going to universal healthcare are misplaced if they don’t at least TRY to account for these costs in our current system.
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I’m not quite sure about the MMT angle. I’ve heard it brought up quite a few times over the past few years, but have never been able to find a clear explainer of exactly how it is supposed to work.
Never mind,the Cost issue is easily answered by looking at any first world country:
Pretty much half of what the US spends now.
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The real cost of universal health care?
OUR FREEDOM!!
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You dont have to wonder; It works great. Really. Just ask anyone else in the G7, G20, EU, OECD, APEC, etc.
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Actually, the Democrat mindset is that it’s nobody’s job to distinguish worthy from unworthy poor, and that in a well-run society there would be no need for charity. It’s a very Republican/Conservative idea that the Poor need to demonstrate their worthiness. The poor should be a model of religious faith, social conformity, and submission to the social hierarchy, showing respect for their superiors. Then and only then will we give them a lovely crust and a used blanket.
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Article was decent, but the bullet list was constructed incorrectly. Here’s the corrected list:
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Uncle Sam spends $3.3 trillion to pay for America’s health services;
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U.S. families and businesses spend $4.3 trillion reimbursing Uncle Sam; (number is made-up, but it’s obviously going to be larger than 3.3 trillion)
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The health-care industry earns [money] (but that’s true regardless of who pays for it)
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(deleted; is completely unrelated to the discussion)
To simplify things for you: The full cost of universal health care is infinity: The cost of your care will go up as you age, with no upper limit. Your body will decay and die, and delaying that will cost ever increasing amounts of money. The only questions are: how much are you willing to spend, and how much are you wiling to pay someone else to hold the money before giving it to the hospitals?
No idea what would happen in your clusterfuck of a health care system, but up here in BC we currently pay the swingeing cost of C$75 per month for health care for our entire family. It used to be $150, but the raging socialists that were elected recently cut it in half, and will be eliminating it entirely at the end of the year.
Datapoint - we are one of the only provinces that actually charges anything. Turns out the cost of administration, collection etc. for fees is basically a waste - because then you have to assess eligibility for subsidies etc etc.
Pre-emptive response to the cherrypicked but eternal link that always comes up when people mention that the Canadian health system is a good and functioning system - there are some issues in some places with wait times for some elective surgeries. And they are being worked on and addressed.
No system is perfect, but jumping christ what a mess you people have been conditioned to live with.
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So you’re saying you don’t want to give up death panels? could you say that louder, and among Republicans…?
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Why is this a tough question? It’s not like we are inventing the wheel. The rest of the world has been conducting the best possible research for us for the past 3 decades.
Take the best ideas from the best systems. Take an average of the annual costs per patient from these systems. Multiply that by the number of Americans.That’s your answer. And it is dramatically less than we are spending now.
A lot of Americans despise paying taxes. This is completely understandable. We get the fewest goods and services in return for what we pay of any civilized country. Let’s change that. People will actually enjoy it.
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My dream is that we remove insurance companies from healthcare and then require Gun owners to purchase Insurance for their firearms, which should be at least as regulated as cars. It’s a win/win.
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YES! The freedom to die, bankrupt and still sick because you can no longer afford any further treatments. USA! USA! USA! USA!
/S/S/S
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That seems to be an inherent flaw in this model. The UK’s NHS does not have armies of people processing “claims”. Nobody makes any “claims”. They just get treated. Treatment organisations manage their budgets (not always brilliantly, it must be said) direct with the government. There’s a bunch more money to be saved, right there, by removing the “you charge, I pay, I claim, they pay” model for treatment billing and using an “I get treated, you/govt pay” model
(Yes I know it’s not quite that simple and th US model being proposed is not a national health service but a single-payer-to-private-businesses model, but really, simply changing who pays will only go so far in fixing your broken healthcare “industry” - and that it is an industry is most of the problem.)
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You seem to be framing this as a negative. Can’t think why.
Yes. Yes they will! Though claiming you get the fewest goods/servies for your tax dollar needs a citation/source. You have the biggest most expensive defence provision, lots of roads, schools, and other civic infrastructure, that many civilised countries would love to be able to afford, and hardly the highest taxes compared to many. I suspect the average US tax payer’s view is that unless it turns up in their house it aint a good or a service and their tax was wasted. Like insurance, tax is not a ‘returns’ game. Some get more value than they pay, some less. But universal healthcare might go a long way to changing the average tax payer’s view of their taxes. Unless they are ‘healthy’, wealthy right wing fucks who are offended by others getting more than their contributed proportion of healthcare spending. Pooling of risk and cost is ALWAYS better for the majority than the failed US rugged individualism that seems to take hold whenever anyone mentions anything communal.
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You sure the UK NHS does not track and approve what is being treated? Or can one simply walk into, say, an oncology clinic, and assert a specific course of treatment without a prior history of diagnosis and presentations?
I guess I am saying that health care systems all have bureaucracies. Ours is especially inefficient, because of the duplication inherent in multiple providers.
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Of course the NHS tracks and approves treatments. Look up NICE as a starter https://www.nice.org.uk/
But no individual patient has to account for their treatment or its cost, other than (highly nominal) prescription charges and the like. No accountant determines whether I am eligible individually, the decisions are clinical, based on practitioner expertise. Yes, there are accounting and budgetting functions. Yes there are provision and service scope decisions (again see NICE) at national and now (since the tory fuckwits decided the NHS needed ‘marketising’) many more local scope decisions as to what treatments will be provided. It is a postcode lottery in that some areas offer (for example) IVF, once, some twice, some not at all without very pressing reason, and so on. But nobody is porcessing millions and millions of individual treatment, care, drug and other personal “claims”. The difference in overhead must be massive.
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Well, the NHS sort of does. After all we have to stop all those health tourists /s.
They don’t like it, they’re not very good at it and we certainly don’t want it extended to anything more than maybe quoting a national insurance number but there is some degree of checking whether someone is entitled.
There is also the NHS Counter-Fraud Authority which does have an army of people checking up on doctors, pharmacists, etc. to make sure they’re claiming the right amounts and not diddling the NHS.
They do. In staggering and complicated detail.
But as @anothernewbbaccount says none of that is really visible or relevant to the patient.
They just turn up and see their GP, get referred to the specialist, go for treatment, complain about waiting times, etc. while the majestic (if slightly dingy) swan that is the NHS paddles away madly below the surface.
https://improvement.nhs.uk/about-us/who-we-are/
Yeah, I’m not sure if non-Brits get that “National Health Service” is a bit of mis-nomer. It’s not national at all except in the sense that it extends across the nation.
The NHS is ultimately a series of entirely separate health organisations covering different areas of the UK. Each such organisation is largely responsible for its own hospitals, staffing and procurement.
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Good point. Worth making more often when US readers need to understand what can and can’t work, and what does and doesn’t work as well as it might, but always better than what doesn’t work in the US.
And the NHS counter-fraud and NI number checking overhead is, I’ll wager, orders of magnitude smaller in people and cost than the US health insurance claims processing industry. And the vast majority of people are NEVER asked to prove eligibility. You need to be unfortunate to have been ill in the last several tory fuckwit years AND have a non-white look/name before anyone even thinks about asking you to prove eligibility.
(Which is now happening even to Brits if they happen to not have regularised their national status despite being given residency 50 years ago when invited to come and live/work here but were foolish enough to think this meant they were now British citizens which it turned out they only realised they might not be if they had the temerity to leave the country for a week or two. Most “health tourism” here is a figment of the imaginations of the Daily Mail / tory fuckwits, and largely linked to our “hostile environemnt” immigration policy - more tory fuckwittery. (did I say the tories are fuckwits?)
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With health care no longer tied to employment, those very same undeserving poor can start small businesses. We can all be job creators! The uber wealthy are just greedy and don’t want to share job creation with the rest of us.
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I believe you may have mentioned it, yes. Mind you, it bears repeating 
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If a business doesn’t have to worry about paying for healthcare for it’s employees then it can afford to pay them more (yeah right), and/or re-invest that money back into the business. ie, this might actually create some jobs.
Of course, it’ll put a lot of people at health insurers out of work.
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