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> "Access to healthcare" is similar. Why do people in Sweden have universal healthcare while people in America do not? Is it corporations? No, Sweden's corporat

> "Access to healthcare" is similar. Why do people in Sweden have universal healthcare while people in America do not? Is it corporations? No, Sweden's corporate tax rate is quite a bit lower than ours. (It's similar to the current federal rate, but in the U.S. most corporations also pay a state rate. In Delaware, for example, it's an additional 8.7%.) So who benefits by Americans not having universal healthcare? It's middle-class Americans who don't pay the high middle-class taxes that middle-class Europeans pay. I believe that the argument here is that insurance companies are the unnecessary middleman gumming up American healthcare. Making $21b in 2018, insurance companies exist to make as much money as possible--by denying coverage when they can and paying out as little as possible. They complicate the process by requiring both the providers and consumers to get tangled up in paperwork, also slowing the process (and quality) down. Her argument there is that we could provide a better experience for all and invest that $21b of profit being leeched out back into actual coverage by going to Medicare for All. > intended to make people falsely believe that you can have universal healthcare and a cleaner planet without decreasing your material quality of life I don't think that's what she's intending. Her plan for cleaning up the planet involves scientific investment in clean/green industries and becoming a leader in providing those services commercially throughout the world. The US is only 20% of the problem, which is why we need an industry to really push this throughout the rest of the world--something that other countries are currently leading in. In case your curious about Warren's approach here: https://medium.com/@teamwarren/my-green-manufacturing-plan-for-america-fc0ad53ab614 https://medium.com/@teamwarren/my-green-manufacturing-plan-f...

tptacek 7y ago
People are fond of blaming health insurance companies for our (demonstrable) health economics woes, but the evidence suggests that they --- in fact, the payer and benefits management side of the equation in general! --- aren't nearly as big a contributor to costs as the provider side. We pay more than Europeans do for health care administration, but we get walloped on costs for outpatient and hospital procedures. It doesn't help that there are lots of circulating analyses about insurers and management overhead that are probably just false; for instance, a popular chart depicting a 4x increase in admin costs starting in the 1990s was debunked by Kevin Drum and others, who observed that it was probably accounting for people like MRI operators on the payer rather than the provider side. Two things pundits say that are red flags for me that they haven't really studied health economics: 1. Blaming pharmaceutical companies and prescription drug costs, which are one of the smaller overall drivers of health care expenses in the US. 2. Blaming health insurance companies for taking an outsized and material chunk of health spending. You could $0 out pharma and insurance companies, indenturing everyone who worked for them, and we might not be meaningfully better off. We'd be paying less, but not, like, a huge amount less; people who can't afford silver-class health insurance for a family of four today still couldn't afford it in that alternate reality.

tptacek 7y ago

People are fond of blaming health insurance companies for our (demonstrable) health economics woes, but the evidence suggests that they --- in fact, the payer and benefits management side of the equation in general! --- aren't nearly as big a contributor to costs as the provider side. We pay more than Europeans do for health care administration, but we get walloped on costs for outpatient and hospital procedures. It doesn't help that there are lots of circulating analyses about insurers and management overhead that are probably just false; for instance, a popular chart depicting a 4x increase in admin costs starting in the 1990s was debunked by Kevin Drum and others, who observed that it was probably accounting for people like MRI operators on the payer rather than the provider side. Two things pundits say that are red flags for me that they haven't really studied health economics: 1. Blaming pharmaceutical companies and prescription drug costs, which are one of the smaller overall drivers of health care expenses in the US. 2. Blaming health insurance companies for taking an outsized and material chunk of health spending. You could $0 out pharma and insurance companies, indenturing everyone who worked for them, and we might not be meaningfully better off. We'd be paying less, but not, like, a huge amount less; people who can't afford silver-class health insurance for a family of four today still couldn't afford it in that alternate reality.