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"Nothing current government does affect cost of medical care" This is a shockingly ignorant statement, the kind of cheap criticism that comes from someone very
by criley2 9y ago
"Nothing current government does affect cost of medical care"
This is a shockingly ignorant statement, the kind of cheap criticism that comes from someone very far away.
Did you know that CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) is the largest American healthcare payer?
In 2015, private insurance total healthcare expenditure was $1,072.1 billion ($1.072T).
But Medicare and Medicaid spent $1,191.3 billion ($1.191T).
The federal government's ability to act a single healthcare purchaser larger than the entire private market has a dramatically large effect on the cost of medical care -- it suppresses as the rock-bottom CMS rates are significantly below private reimbursement.
Of course, this only examines the impact of the federal government directly on the market as its largest participant -- it does not BEGIN to examine the massive statutory/regulatory influence the government has on the price of health care.
>If anything, they suppress flow of cheap money to medical providers which only inflates its costs even more.
It's the exact opposite.
CMS/federal healthcare spending is the ultra-low cost one, flowing an enormous sum of cheap-per-person money to any service provider that will take them.
It's the massively-inflated private reimbursements which service providers love.
>The largest shares of total health spending were sponsored by the federal government (28.7 percent) and the households (27.7 percent). The private business share of health spending accounted for 19.9 percent of total health care spending, state and local governments accounted for 17.1 percent, and other private revenues accounted for 6.7 percent.
https://www.cms.gov/research-statistics-data-and-systems/statistics-trends-and-reports/nationalhealthexpenddata/nhe-fact-sheet.html https://www.cms.gov/research-statistics-data-and-systems/sta...
The more you know.
- tonyhb 9y agoIt costs the UK £123.7b to run the NHS for a year: http://www.nhsconfed.org/resources/key-statistics-on-the-nhs http://www.nhsconfed.org/resources/key-statistics-on-the-nhs America spends more than 7 times that for private health insurance. Something's wrong.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- hippich 9y agoIt is not wrong, americans, because they dump so much money into private and federal insurance, only to get the most health care it is physically possible where in UK they are much more conservative with spending tons of money on anything possible. This is both good and bad. Bad for expenses. Good for medial innovation, since this industry attracts alot of funding to do more innovation.
- r00fus 9y agoIs that a fair comparison? The UK has a population of 65M, which is about 1/5 of the US @320M. The UK still probably gets a better bang for the quid - at least until the Tories' mismanagement of NHS comes home to roost.
- michaelchisari 9y agoHealth care spending per capita for 2015 was $4,003 for the UK and $9,451 in the USA. So while 7x is not accurate, 2.35x is nothing to cough at.
- hippich 9y agoIt doesn't mean medical care is more expensive or less efficient here, it is just that americans buy more of it. https://www.quora.com/What-makes-the-US-healthcare-system-so-expensive https://www.quora.com/What-makes-the-US-healthcare-system-so...
- hippich 9y agoIt is not in interests of government to negotiate it hard. If anything - they will lose budget. Same with private insurances - unless it hits their bottom line, they will not negotiate and simply accept slowly increasing medical care costs, and push costs to payers (just like government will push costs to taxpayers) Having less of insurance money (both federal and private) will make pool of cheap money less which in effect should drive price lower. So if anything, attempts of current government to decrease amount of cheap money means that it might only move costs lower. Granted, these changes are minor in dollars, so effect will be not very visible. Stop paying for family doctor visit via insurance - and you immediately see costs going down. (also please decrease cheap money available to student to get loans without any qualification to pay for it and you will see tuition fees going down)
- dragonwriter 9y ago> Did you know that CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) is the largest American healthcare payer? True, but the numbers you post are misleading, in that CMS is not the payer for total Medicaid spending (state governments are, and CMS reimburses some portion of te State spending, which varies by state, beneficiary attributes, and other factors.)