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Comment by brians | Hacker News Reader

That’s over twenty years. So $100B/year. There are 0.3B of us. So that’s $3000 per person per year. That’s about what my employer pays for a BCBS elite HD-HSA PPO for my group of relatively young, affluent, healthy tech workers in Boston.

It doesn’t come close to covering all of it.

There are 3M nurses and 1M doctors in the US. That $100B/yr could pay each $25k in salary, and cover no equipment.

Let’s say we want to pay nurses $150k and doctors $250k, good middle class salaries comparable to tech incomes. You need $700B per year.

That’s not impossible to find at https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/US_fed_spending_pie_cha..., and I think we should—but it’s not obvious how to do so or what to sacrifice.

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$100B/year divided by 0.3B equals $333 per year.

That’s not enough for one full monthly premium payment on the ACA exchanges.

However, the average ACA subsidy per person on the marketplace varies tremendously by State, but is typically well above $333 per month.

https://www.kff.org/health-reform/state-indicator/average-mo...

> Let’s say we want to pay nurses $150k and doctors $250k, good middle class salaries comparable to tech incomes.

Regardless of the rest of the logic, those are not middle class salaries. They aren't even middle class household (i.e. 2x earners) incomes in almost all of the country.

Tech salaries are a terrible benchmark for a lot or reasons, but those are well above average tech salaries also.

The US pays more per citizen for healthcare than any civilized country in the world, and gets poorer outcomes.

There is a LOT of room for lowering your costs and improving your outcomes when you’re ready to redesign it. But yeah, if you just try to duct tape over a crack here, and bolt a new feature on there, nothing seems to work.

The 100B/year would be as well as current health spending, not instead of it.

What would the additional costs of universal health care be, and would 100B/year cover it? Currently about 27m Americans do not have health insurance. 100B would yield about $3,700 per person which is probably about enough to do it.

I don't think nurses are going to be earning an average of $150k/yr under any system.

You have to think beyond the accounting. Think of the opportunity cost.

Many people stay at their jobs because of healthcare. Period. Either they don't want to lose it, or don't want to lose some aspect of it. How many startups aren't started? How many dreams aren't filled? How much value isn't created?

I'll take the extra $3k over spending it on achieving nothing in the middle east.

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