Ending the Stranglehold of Health Care Costs on American Families

elizabethwarren.com

5 points·cascom··4 comments

The plan suffers from the same problem as the student loan plan: reducing the cost to zero for the majority of consumers.

Rather than reduce co-pays to zero, patients should share in the cost at some level capped at some number. Similarly, the student loan forgiveness she proposes should have a sort of co-pay. Instead of paying off the first $50,000 of student loans, it should pay all student loans above some level, perhaps $5,000. By having patients and students share in the cost of their treatment and education, they are incentivized to make wise choices. By taking care of the costs beyond some point, patients and students are protected from catastrophic outcomes resulting from systemic failures.

I think visibility into costs is not any sort of driving control for healthcare (nor education loans). They are already features of our existing system and do nothing to control costs vs having the appropriate government regulation - in the case of healtcare of drug and service prices like other nations, or of providing basic low-cost public university options again like most modern nations besides the US does.

I thought this was an interesting discussion of some of the tradeoffs in the financing of the plan.

https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2019/11/01/warrens-perp...

Regardless of what you think of this plan its absolutely stunning in terms of the wholesale changes to the way Americans receive healthcare and are taxed.

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