3 ms·
People who are paying insurance premiums and taxes currently put money in two areas we'll call 'insurance' and 'tax' for convenience sake (and because it accura
by clavalle 11y ago
People who are paying insurance premiums and taxes currently put money in two areas we'll call 'insurance' and 'tax' for convenience sake (and because it accurately reflects reality). The money in the 'insurance' area goes toward paying private medical costs. If those private medical costs disappear and are shifted to public costs under a single payer plan, they don't go away, merely move under that other column. From then on, no money need be put into the 'insurance' area. Yay! But now, the 'tax' area has to pay out more since it took on those costs so much of the money that would have been put in the 'insurance' area must be put over in the 'tax' area to cover the medical costs that have not disappeared but been recatagorized in terms of what pool it is paid out of. Even if those private medical costs are halved somehow, saving the payee money in the process, the 'tax' area would still need to be bolstered to handle the additional burden. Thus, higher taxes even though overall money is saved.
- sharemywin 11y agoI read somewhere that insurance company profits are the things you save in a single payer system. insurance "expenses" would be shifted to government expenses.
- clavalle 11y agoThere are all kinds of savings in a single payer system. You eliminate the overhead of dealing with disparate billing systems. You can more easily find waste and fraud since all data is flowing into one place in a single comparable format. And, most importantly, you have the power of being the only buyer in a market which can pretty much dictate what price they will pay as long as it doesn't drive the providers directly out of business. But it is disingenuous for OP to suggest that because taxes go up it is an overall worse situation for those paying those taxes, implying there is no way they would save money.