I am all for affordable healthcare for everybody, just desperately afraid of how the gov't typically overspends.
Looking at American policies from an outside perspective, it seems the government is unwilling to be the one that will actually suggest that maybe the answer to many current budget problems is to spend less.
The best most cost effective solution to health care is single payer government operation of the health care system. It's a tried and proven over decades to cut the cost of health care all over the rest of the industrialized world.
For some ludicrous reason, the beloved-by the British UK model of health care is called "communism" if it's even mentioned here
When did Great Britain turn communist? I completely missed that event.
But I don't think this is true of either the European socialist states, or of U.S. liberals. You can cherry pick examples of radical elements, Fox News style, but they aren't the main concern here - economic risk is the big one. A tightly integrated state can operate more efficiently than one that tries to regulate companies from afar, but if it goes down due to a "black swan" event, recovery is going to be more difficult.
Depends a bit on what you mean with efficency.
How many states have gone down? Somalia. That's it.
Now how many corporations have gone down leaving the people who the corporation agreed to provide services to in deep trouble?
It's almost quite literally infinitely more risky to trust a corporation than it is to trust government.
Medicare currently operates on a 3% margin. That is, 97% of funds in the medicare program go toward reimbursing patient care. The vast majority of private health insurers operate on a 20-30% margin. The rest of the money goes towards marketing, sales, and towards profit.
Like it or not, every body is shouldering the cost of uninsured patients. One in 6 Americans don't have health insurance, yet they still consume health care. Who pays for that? Everybody does. Hospitals are under a federal mandate to care for everyone regardless of ability to pay. So, to compensate for their losses on uninsured patients. They artificially inflate the rates they charge everyone else to compensate. So, every time you use the health care system, you are paying for uninsured people's care.
Hospitals that have a disproportionately large share of uninsured and minimally insured patients (e.g. a county hospital, non-profit hospitals in the ghetto, small rural hospitals in farming country) routinely need and receive government subsidies to function. Those hospitals are largely subsidized by special funding bills.
Universal coverage, just means that we are now going to be explicit in determining how we are going to pay for people's health care.
edit: added 3rd paragraph.
The main objective is punishing those that wish to pay for their own care and retain control over it by shifting everyone else's costs to them.
Then once people give up fighting the current and get their care covered by the government, they lose control of what happens and accept lower quality because at least it is free.
Then whatever entity is providing care performs whatever possible procedure and drugs they can get away with, while starving the hell out of any preventive measure may make sense. The money spent follows the lobbying.
but don't worry, it will be years before you fall into this sink hole and your family come and visit you as you go down, so it won't be all bad
15% of medicare spending is lost to fraud apparently. please don't bring these same "efficiency" to the whole system. ugh
on top of this, medicare costs are expected to skyrocket w/ babyboomers starting to retire. one more unsustainable situation brushed under the rug
In this particular case, the idea is that we pay $100 billion a year of tax payer money. (For comparison sake, the F-22 program alone cost 65 billion including development. You could only buy 500 F-22s for $100 billion)
With that 100 billion dollars, we attempt to bring into line the 2.3 trillion dollars that we spend a year on healthcare. (16% of GDP).
16% of GDP is way more than other western countries spend on healthcare. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_compared#Cross-coun...
Other western countries spend about 8-10% GDP on healthcare.
So lets do the math. Lets say we spend tax money on healthcare and we only manage to get it down 1% from 16% to 15%. That would be a 1/16th reduction on 2.3 trillion dollars... approximately 140 billion dollars. So if we even manage to knock 1% off of the amount spent on healthcare by doing this, we've sent 40 billion dollars back to the taxpayers.
If we get more than 1% off of our %GDP towards healthcare, we start making some serious bucks for Americans. If we got our % spent on HC down to even 10% we would have made a 540 billion dollar win on this issue.
(Yes, it comes in the form of taxes, but it also means that in the long run you aren't paying as much for insurance premiums... health insurance premiums might as well be a tax that doesn't go to the government, as having healthcare isn't optional if you plan on living for a significant amount of time...)
We die sooner, we spend more of our own money and we spend more government money.
lose/lose.
Healthcare doesn't make sense when viewed as a market economy.
First off, there is a potentially infinite demand for healthcare. (How much will you pay to live a little longer? As death approaches, the amount you will pay can be seen as an asymptote towards infinity. You have to be a particularly well balanced individual for this not to happen.)
Competing for actual finite resources (hospital beds, doctors, nurses, medications, the drafty-but-fashionable hospital-johnny), with a number of people who are going to die anyway, but are willing (if not able) to pay non-finite sums of money, clearly points us towards a conflict. The only conclusion is for the price of the finite resources to increase indefinitely.