I don't know if you fully understand. "We" are not paying for healthcare one way or another; traditionally, our employer has provided insurance, which typically covered virtually all medical and dental costs. You are shifting that cost from the employer to the employee.
Exactly, we are unburdening our employers from having to nanny us. We can then make our own health care decisions, go to whatever provider we want, and make the best deal that we can, just like we do every other product. I don't need my employer to buy my food for me, just give me the dam money and I will buy my own food.
And today a week in the hospital without a single surgical procedure can cost in excess of 100k. What percentage of that, in addition to the price of insurance, which is ridiculously expensive, do you feel the average working-class family can afford?
Under our current system, the typical family spends more on insurance (directly or indirectly) than we do in healthcare over our life span. We could pay 100% of that if there was no spending on insurance (by us, our employers, the guberment, etc). Anyhow, I would think that paying 100% of the first thousand, 50% of the next $4k, 25% of the next $10k, 10% of the next 10K, and 5% of the remainder would be reasonable. So add all that up, it's about $10k. It's substantial enough that I would price shop, and low enough that even if I had to make payments on my treatment, it wouldn't financially devistate my family.
But you are missing the point that health care providers and insurance companies are ripping us off. Our current system is exceptionally complicated, and those who have insurance are grossly overcharged to make up for those of us who don't have insurance and often recieve huge non-insured discounts or even get treated without paying a penny. That $100,000 bill could easily be just $25k if everyone paid and if there was price competition between providers. Now under the deductible system that I outlined above, we are only talking about $6,500, which is about what insurance costs a family of 4 for three months coverage.
Part of the reason that American families are as broke as we are is because we spend way too much on medical care and insurance.
I met with congress a year before Obamacare became law, and proposed a system similar to what I outlined here. At the time, all levels of government combined paid almost 50% of our national healthcare bill. That was $1.2 trillion dollars of government healthcare and health insurance spending. It averaged out to about $4,000 per citizen. That's actually enough to purchased a high deductible insurance policy for every single citizen, and rebate each citizen a thousand dollars into a personal HSA which could then be used to pay for deductibles, transfered between family members to pay each others medical expenses, or carried over from year to year if not utilized. Way back then we were 50% the way to a 100% universal healthcare system, these days, with the Obamacare subsidies and expansions of medicade, we are probably a lot closer to already paying for universal healthcare. But if we set up the deductible system so that we on average paid out of pocket 50% of our cost, even assuming that costs don't decline (although I am confident that it would), then we already are spending enough tax dollars to pay for universal health insurance.
And simply laughing at our failure, to point to single-payer, as increased medicaid costs, does not in any way resolve this issue of unaffordable care. There was a lot this congress could have done to address our ridiculously over-priced fee-for-services system, but they did nothing.
By getting rid of the cause of high medical costs and significantly reducing insurance company overhead, and equally spreading out the money that the government already spends on healthcare, we solve the issue of unafforable care.
I would also add that your financial wisdom is greatly oversimplified; worse, it's only as secure as the faith others ascribe to it: good luck with that.
Yes, it is over simplified. I don't care to retype all of the details, but I would be more than happy to discuss your concerns on an item by item bases.
