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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

We could. Who is going to pay that bill?

Well you see it would free up a huge amount of money that employers are currently paying to insurers. If you take that money (by raising the Medicare premium on employees), plus the existing medicaid budget, existing medicare tax and payroll tax contributions America's healthcare system would receive over 40% more money to cover care per capita than the next leading contestant. Almost 2X the OECD average. In PPP dollars no less.

https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...

"But where would the money come from" is one of the wildest questions to ask about a system that already costs double the average. I'd say, give or take, the same place its coming from now, but like, less.

I pay $2k a month through work for a plan. I could pay that plus the payroll deduction plus the pittance my employer kicks in. I’d make that trade all day every day.

would it actually be that different of a bill?

i imagine its already doing the most expensive part, treating people who are almost dead who have lots of procedures that could be done.

picking up people that need basically no care sounds pretty cheap by comparison

Estimates of Medicare errors, fraud and abuse are around $60 billion. Greatly increasing the scope of it will, inevitably, increase that figure.

Estimates of health insurance fraud is also around $30 billion, so same order of magnitude, and considering the margins of error and the fact that they are estimates, by definition, it makes it hard to say public health insurance is more fraud ridden then private. Plus due to the inherent differences there are probably differing avenues of research and estimating possible between private and public insurance, and heck whole different forms of draining money that might affect ease of uncovering the level of fraud between private and public, which would make it have an even larger margin of error.

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