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Single payer debate no so easy

vegas giants said:
You deny people wait for healthcare in the US sometimes until they die?

Deny it first
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Deny what? That some folks cannot get to healthcare in time to save themselves? Sure.. that happens everywhere.

Deny that sometimes folks.. despite the law that healthcare has to be provided to try and save their lives regardless of ability to pay.. people will choose not to go get that care? Sure.. that happens everywhere

Deny that sometimes folks.. who need care.. will be told by providers that waiting is okay for them because of insurance reasons? Sure.. that happens everywhere too.

Whats your point vegas?

You haven't supported a single assertion you have made.. from the economics you claim in spite of Greenbeards information..

From your claim that Canada "didn;t go broke".. and thus their economic situation at that time is analogous to the US current economic situation..

From your claim that Canada has plenty of access and doesn;t have a problem with rural areas.
 
jaeger19 said:
Deny what? That some folks cannot get to healthcare in time to save themselves? Sure.. that happens everywhere.

Deny that sometimes folks.. despite the law that healthcare has to be provided to try and save their lives regardless of ability to pay.. people will choose not to go get that care? Sure.. that happens everywhere

Deny that sometimes folks.. who need care.. will be told by providers that waiting is okay for them because of insurance reasons? Sure.. that happens everywhere too.

Whats your point vegas?

You haven't supported a single assertion you have made.. from the economics you claim in spite of Greenbeards information..

From your claim that Canada "didn;t go broke".. and thus their economic situation at that time is analogous to the US current economic situation..

From your claim that Canada has plenty of access and doesn;t have a problem with rural areas.
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Canada has no more of a problem with rural areas than we have.


Canada has a robust and thriving economy. Do you deny this too?
 
vegas giants said:
Canada has no more of a problem with rural areas than we have.
?
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Well lets see your evidence.

But.. lets assume you are right.. wouldn;t more hospitals closing do to reducing the cost.. then make the US situation worse? Please explain.. how closing more hospitals.. would not make the situation in the US worse.


Canada has a robust and thriving economy. Do you deny this too?
.
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Nope.. point?

Can you show that Canada switched their economy from one in which it had almost a third of its GDP in healthcare.. to now 11.5% without a problem?
 
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jaeger19 said:
Lets see your evidence.

And lets see that Canada has a robust and thriving economy with healthcare the same percentage of its economy as the US.. .
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I don't need evidence until you deny it first


Do you deny that Canada has a robust economy currently?
 
vegas giants said:
I don't need evidence until you deny it first


Do you deny that Canada has a robust economy currently?
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You don't need evidence until I deny it? So.. in other words. you have no evidence of your assertion.
 
Boo Radley said:
Over the years I've seen misrepresentations and down right lies about single payer systems but both advocates and critics. Few discuss the ow they really compare, and it's likely a push concerning costs. And wait times need context. If I can't afford a treatment or not get one, what difference does a slightly longer wait time mean to me? And there are other such questions. But I saw this and thought it might start a conversation that is less convoluted with misinformation. Anyway:

But the bigger problem with Trump’s comparison is that switching to a single-payer system would mean shifting the ultimate payer for health care services from the patient and the employer to the government. Why is that important? Because even as federal expenditures for health care rise under a single-payer system, the expenditures by individuals and companies would fall, potentially canceling each other out.

https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-...1/how-expensive-would-single-payer-system-be/
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Uh, you DO know where the government would get the money to pay for the care, right? "Single Payer" is in fact "Everyone who has a job Pays for Everyone"
 
Bullseye said:
Uh, you DO know where the government would get the money to pay for the care, right? "Single Payer" is in fact "Everyone who has a job Pays for Everyone"
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That is what we have now. We just pay for it in the most expensive way possible
 
So begins the inevitable "left-right dueling bumper stickers" phase of the single-payer debate. Hopefully the OP wasn't trying to evoke a substantive discussion of the issues!

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Bullseye said:
Uh, you DO know where the government would get the money to pay for the care, right? "Single Payer" is in fact "Everyone who has a job Pays for Everyone"
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I think you're holding on to a propaganda belief. You pay now. Go buy a bandaid at the hospital and tell me the cost. Look, it's a huge problem that too many individuals simply can't overcome alone. And we pay a lot. Add our premiums, what our employers pay, and what things cost at the hospital. Taxes won't like cost more. And people who can't get, will be freed to get the care they need.
 
Boo Radley said:
I think you're holding on to a propaganda belief. You pay now. Go buy a bandaid at the hospital and tell me the cost. Look, it's a huge problem that too many individuals simply can't overcome alone. And we pay a lot. Add our premiums, what our employers pay, and what things cost at the hospital. Taxes won't like cost more. And people who can't get, will be freed to get the care they need.
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Right now, Medicare has about 60 million recipients being supported by about 150 million workers. AND it's running out of money. Now change that so those workers are now paying for the healthcare of 330 million and do the math.
 
Bullseye said:
Right now, Medicare has about 60 million recipients being supported by about 150 million workers. AND it's running out of money. Now change that so those workers are now paying for the healthcare of 330 million and do the math.
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Yes. But now companies have no healthcare costs. They can pay more taxes in place of that
 
Bullseye said:
Right now, Medicare has about 60 million recipients being supported by about 150 million workers. AND it's running out of money. Now change that so those workers are now paying for the healthcare of 330 million and do the math.
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But note it's design. It pays for only the most unhealthy, the people most likely to use the system. Shouldn't the workers also benefit from that system? And more would be put in. The healthy carry the unhealthy until they are the unhealthy. It's how such systems work. So many paying won't be using the same costly services as the unhealthy you are now paying for. Look around the world and you will see this is doable.
 
vegas giants said:
I don't need evidence until you deny it first


Do you deny that Canada has a robust economy currently?
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Nope.. I do not deny Canada has a robust economy currently.

Do you deny that Canada's healthcare makes up a smaller section of their GDP than the US?

Do you deny that you have no evidence of what Canada's healthcare was as a percentage of GDP.. before they went to their current system?

Do you deny that you have no evidence that would suggest that cutting healthcare in the US. would not hurt GDP.. nor care.. especially as demand is growing for healthcare?
 
jaeger19 said:
Nope.. I do not deny Canada has a robust economy currently.

Do you deny that Canada's healthcare makes up a smaller section of their GDP than the US?

Do you deny that you have no evidence of what Canada's healthcare was as a percentage of GDP.. before they went to their current system?

Do you deny that you have no evidence that would suggest that cutting healthcare in the US. would not hurt GDP.. nor care.. especially as demand is growing for healthcare?
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Good. Then you can have a single payer system and have a robust economy. I knew we would finally get there. LOL
 
Greenbeard said:
But single-payer doesn't just magically cost less. There's some one-time savings to be had from administrative simplification when we eliminate those jobs, but many proposals tend to immediately give those savings back by making the coverage more generous than anyone has today. (Rhetorically this concept sometimes surfaces when a politician implies that job losses on one side of the ledger, e.g. in insurance or provider administrative functions, will be offset by job gains in clinical care delivery or elsewhere in the health system. Less politically fraught but a scenario in which savings aren't realized!)

It does not follow that if (1) single-payer exists someplace else and (2) that particular someplace else spends less on health care that (3) the U.S. will spend less on health care if it adopts single-payer. There are trade-offs to be considered--something has to be given up. The question is always: are we willing to give it up? My second point under the "cons" list above was getting at the fact that moving that question fully into the political sphere may well make it less likely that we choose to give anything up. Which again doesn't bode well for cost control.



Prevention is good! Keeping people healthy and better serving them is a legitimate function of our health system and universal coverage (one of the "pros" I listed above) can certainly facilitate that.

But prevention isn't really what differentiates us from the other OECD countries, particularly if we're talking about the difference in cost structure.

First, we're not that bad on prevention. International comparisons like The Commonwealth Fund's "Mirror, Mirror" series which tend to rank the U.S. low overall in international comparisons actually find that we do pretty okay on prevention.



Second, just to consider this particular example, pregnant women have always been eligible for Medicaid coverage at higher income thresholds than the rest of the eligibility categories under that program. The barriers to getting care extend beyond simply having insurance coverage. Things like the local provider landscape or other factors that impact individual behavior and uptake of recommended services still need to be addressed. Single-payer isn't a silver bullet.

Third, many of the major cost differentiators are the sorts of things I mentioned in the post above. Prevention is a good thing from a quality-of-life perspective but it's not going to get us to where other systems are cost-wise.
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I am an actual expert. Who works in Insurance.

Single payer will magically just cost less, because of how hospitals set their prices.

They use something called a Chargemaster. Expecting to have to negotiate with hundreds of different insurance companies, and medicare. They set their prices about 1000 percent above cost. It's common for a client of mine to receive an out of network bill for double or triple, what it would cost in network. Now here's the thing, that in network cost is still marked up at least 100 percent above cost.

The only reason we even know what things cost is because of VA hospitals by the way, Hospital Cartels do not put those numbers out, and actively derail any attempt to do so. They lobby more than oil. To keep their price fixing game going.

Medicare, pays an average of an areas cost for a procedure. So hospitals jack up price in an area to drive up what medicare pays them.

A single payer system, means one negotiator, instead of thousands. One standardized set of prices. And an end to price fixing from hospitals. Under a single payer system. A broken arm won't cost 6,000 dollars. It will cost 400.

So yes. From an actual expert. Who works in Insurance. Who faces a 10,000 dollar fine and loss of license if knowingly misleads anyone about insurance.

Cost will magically go down under a single payer system.

Edit: and if the one person who works for the hospital disagrees, he is free to post the chargemaster list for his hospital to prove me wrong. Otherwise, let's not do this again.
 
ThoughtEx. said:
I am an actual expert. Who works in Insurance.

Single payer will magically just cost less, because of how hospitals set their prices.

They use something called a Chargemaster. Expecting to have to negotiate with hundreds of different insurance companies, and medicare. They set their prices about 1000 percent above cost. It's common for a client of mine to receive an out of network bill for double or triple, what it would cost in network. Now here's the thing, that in network cost is still marked up at least 100 percent above cost.

The only reason we even know what things cost is because of VA hospitals by the way, Hospital Cartels do not put those numbers out, and actively derail any attempt to do so. They lobby more than oil. To keep their price fixing game going.

Medicare, pays an average of an areas cost for a procedure. So hospitals jack up price in an area to drive up what medicare pays them.

A single payer system, means one negotiator, instead of thousands. One standardized set of prices. And an end to price fixing from hospitals. Under a single payer system. A broken arm won't cost 6,000 dollars. It will cost 400.

So yes. From an actual expert. Who works in Insurance. Who faces a 10,000 dollar fine and loss of license if knowingly misleads anyone about insurance.

Cost will magically go down under a single payer system.

Edit: and if the one person who works for the hospital disagrees, he is free to post the chargemaster list for his hospital to prove me wrong. Otherwise, let's not do this again.
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Well said from an expert who knows
 
Boo Radley said:
But note it's design. It pays for only the most unhealthy, the people most likely to use the system. Shouldn't the workers also benefit from that system? And more would be put in. The healthy carry the unhealthy until they are the unhealthy. It's how such systems work. So many paying won't be using the same costly services as the unhealthy you are now paying for. Look around the world and you will see this is doable.
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More would be put in? Even the most conservative estimates say it would that an increase equal to 2/3 to 3/4 of what we're already paying in federal taxes.
 
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