There was a carefully thought out single payer plan on the ballot in California last November. It laid out all the expenses and costs in detail, and I was hoping it would win so it could be evaluated in practice.
But it lost. And I suspect the transparent campaign was why. If it had been sold as Free Health Care! Paid for by People Who Aren’t You! it could have won in a landslide.
Apparently this joke is still funny nearly 40 years later
Every hospital and many doctors offices have to employ armies of “coders” and “compliance officers” to deal with the insanely complex and vague billing rules of the “efficient” Medicare system and the way that system criminalizes “incorrect” medical decision making. I expect that any single payer system in the USA would extend that same “efficiency” to every patient encounter nationwide.
The system that the ACA was based on, “Romneycare”, has been working extremely well here in Massachusetts for quite awhile. I’m very glad that our Governor has made it quite clear that no matter what happens to the ACA, guaranteed coverage will continue here unabated. I’m happy to have been the test case for it.
The tragedy here is that the ACA was designed as a big Lego block for a single-payer system. That was Obama’s stated goal; he was very straightforward in saying that he knew that with an obstructionist Republican congress, leaping directly to single-payer would be a giant waste of time. The ACA was designed to be the first step, with the intent that after it was fully enacted, a future administration could adapt it to single-payer.
As much as I love the idea of socialized medicine, I don’t realistically think that saying “hey, let’s dismantle the entire megalithic insurance industry and start over!” is something that’ll happen under any one administration.
“What do you expect from us? We’re evil!”
It was a lot funnier when these guys did it.
At least now that guy on Facebook will hear from someone he listens to that Obamacare and the ACA are the same thing.
I stipulated that even if you made the private system perfectly efficient it will always be less efficient than a single payer system of the same quality. With private insurance a hospital also employs armies of people to negotiate deals with insurance companies, and the “coders” and “compliance officers” for Medicaid are also needed for each private insurance, and they have to carry finance departments to chase down the uninsured (and the insured); and private offices spend hours outside their office hours doing this shit if they don’t affiliate with a corporate healthcare entity to do it. That’s without mentioning that insurance companies tend to refuse to pay out without a fight outside of a set of standard procedures.
Funny, I read that doctors and hospitals in the US need to employ armies of admin staff to deal with the complexities of private insurance billing and keep track of which procedures are covered by which insurers.
(EDIT: I didn’t see emo_pinata’s reply before posting.)
Oh, it’s both. It’s just that if you bill an insurance company in a way it doesn’t like, you don’t get paid. If you bill Medicare in a way it doesn’t like, you can go to jail.
Now if I were part of the Trumpenproletariat, I would suggest that the reason that the USA’s life expectancy is so low is that we allow massive immigration from countries where it’s lower than ours.
What I’m really likely to think is that there’s a causation effect here in that health care costs are lower (and thus the solvency of a national health care system more likely) in nations whose populations, for genetic and lifestyle reasons, tend to be healthier.
In all the ways that do not involve actual political power, again Pence will be handling the running of the country and interactions with Congress.
And a GOP Congress will rubber-stamp any of his measures, no matter how irresponsible, that cuts taxes or guts regulatory agencies or cuts the “undeserving” off from public assistance or subtracts rights and privileges from women and minorities.
Follow it through, all the way to the end then, you are so close!
“Because they have low health care costs and therefore are more proactive about solving issues before they become long-term expensive problems.”
Because right now Americans don’t go to the doctor for the little things, it’s a $50 copay to see about that cough that is actually bronchitis. That weird lump should hopefully go away.
In other countries they just go get a stupid thing checked out before it gets expensive. Keeping costs lower and the populace healthier.
Or anywhere without the proper protection?
Citation?
ETA: Ah, you’ve brought this up before and didn’t back it up then…
Privatized health care is just as byzantine and hard to navigate and often pays for shit.
I’ve had some vague interest in Night in the Woods lately. I guess it’s about time to satisfy that curiosity
Just bein’ the people’s microphone because this can’t be said too often (or too loudly) enough.
A year or two ago the NYT compared the cost of some routine procedures just north of and just south of the US-Canada border. The same procedure costs 2 to 10 times as much in the US.
People who sell house insurance make more money when house values go up. They sell larger policies.
People who sell health insurance make more money when the value of health goes up. They sell larger policies. Sure this is more complex and layered but the basic fact is the same - the more valuable the thing being insured, the more money there is in insuring it.
The people who are negotiating the cost of procedures (insurance companies) and the people who are selling them (health care providers) both want prices to go up.
This has nothing to do with people in other nations being healthier, and everything to do with the fact that a private system has to divert money that could be spent on patient health into private profit.
It’s thanks to low- and no- information voters and a hyper-partisan attitude among Republicans who hate anything Obama is involved with. We’ve got those who don’t know the ACA is Obamacare, we’ve got those who know they’re the same and heard Trump promise to repeal it but dismissed the possibility, and we’ve got those who just don’t know what the fuck is going on, on any level. That last category is turning out to have a shocking number of people in it. These people are removed from even the most basic information; the kind who justified voting for Trump by saying things like, and I paraphrase only slightly here, “We heard he was some sort of businessman, so we figured he could help our economy.” Those people are going to get broadsided by the loss of health insurance because they don’t even know the loss of it is on the table.
Common sense? Well, there’s the fly in your ointment, right there.
Because the Republican party has been moving itself and its voters into complete dysfunction. I read a lot about how extremely partisan US politics has become - but it’s Republicans, not those on the left, who have become so extreme. Hand-in-hand with this is the Republican party encouraging no-information voters; the Repubs are dominated by them in a way the Dems aren’t (as the whole fake news situation showed). That’s not to say that there aren’t hyper-partisan, no-information Democrats, but the evidence suggests they’re relatively rare.
And the dysfunction it created lives on, unsurprisingly. It’s not like the massive poverty and social inequality baked into the society were going to get tossed off in a decade or two.
Deaths in Russia are primarily caused by alcohol, drugs, suicide and violence. (The number of women killed each day in domestic violence incidents is staggering.) That’s what happens when the economy’s fucked and the government is corrupt and pulls away the social safety net that previously existed. I guess we’ll find out all about that in the coming years…
