Comment by flamble | Hacker News Reader

Comment by flamble | Hacker News Reader

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> at least it would prove to work here- it's not like the US is in the exact same position as the EU

The EU and Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Bahrain, Brunei, Australia, and New Zealand. It works all over the world. Research on the US system accords with the overwhelming evidence from all around: it would work.

> eg, I'm not sure how they're connected ... medical research

Let's clarify. The repugnant gouging in the cost of hospital care, doctor's visits etc redounds mostly to the profit of private insurance who provide no social value in return. The exorbitant cost of medicine does indeed flow to pharmaceutical companies, but the particulars of how they would be affected depend on the details of how universal health care was implemented.

> complaints that our health care is 'too expensive' never seem to take into account that our (expensive) health care is the best in the world

I have no idea where you got that notion; the US is generally not ranked in the top 20.

https://www.who.int/healthinfo/paper30.pdf

https://healthcarechannel.co/how-australian-healthcare-ranks...

> The EU and Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Bahrain, Brunei, Australia, and New Zealand. It works all over the world.

Not necessarily at the same price though. The US healthcare system is crazy expensive because US salaries for high-skill individuals are crazy high (because tuition is crazy high?....). To fund an expansion might be more expensive.

I'm sure it's possible, but if you need more funding, you need more taxes. I'm not at all sure Americans would be okay with that. Remember that you have very low taxes compared to Europe or Japan.

Not qualified to have an opinion on that, though of course that doesn't prevent me from a back-of-the-envelope calculation:

* A third of US healthcare cost is assumed to be administrative overhead just caused by the current system. "Cutting U.S. administrative costs to the $550 per capita (in 2017 U.S. dollars) level in Canada could save more than $600 billion, the researchers say." [0]

* Median wage level for healthcare workers (everyone directly care-related, i.e. including nurses, technicians and MDs) is $68k, about 5.5M people alltogether. [1]

* With the efficency gain of $600B one could double the headcount of medical practitioners and still be better off as a society.

[0] = https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-costs-administrati...

[1] = https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes290000.htm

I'm sure there are large cost savings possible, Canada seems to spend about half as much on administration (17% vs 34%) [1]. While not quite four times as much, that'd still be significant, though whether it's guaranteed to have the same effect in the US is uncertain. Canada and the US may be neighbors, but they're quite different in culture.

[1] https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M19-2818

> Not necessarily at the same price though. The US healthcare system is crazy expensive because US salaries for high-skill individuals are crazy high (because tuition is crazy high?....). To fund an expansion might be more expensive.

Cut new grad salaries in return for halfing their student loan, otherwise the outrageous cost of education is being subsidised by the sick and elderly.

But pharmaceutical companies and health insurance companies are not outrageously profitable compared to chemical manufacturers and other insurers (respectively). The biggest cost center in the health industry is human resources, and nobody seems willing to tackle that (by reducing remuneration to doctors and nurses).

Health insurance definitely is outrageously profitable compared to other insurance sectors: https://www.statista.com/statistics/948687/health-insurance-...

It’s paywalled, but based on the blurb it’s an irrelevant comparison of absolute dollars of profit from a health insurance company versus a non health insurance company selling health insurance. One would expect a grocery store to have more absolute dollars of profit from selling groceries than a gas station would.

The profit margins of a health insurance company are ~5% per the SEC filings of the largest insurance companies, which is not a large profit margin.

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