9 ms·

You could take the entire defense budget, and the defense budget from every other country in the world, and you would be less than 50% of the funding you would

by cwhiz 6y ago

You could take the entire defense budget, and the defense budget from every other country in the world, and you would be less than 50% of the funding you would need for a single year of Medicare for all. The US spends about $3.6 trillion per year on health care. I have no idea what UBI might cost, but I know we don’t have the tax revenues to get even close. Maybe the money printer can go brrrr a little bit faster.

tele 6y ago
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(19)33019-3/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... "Taking into account both the costs of coverage expansion and the savings that would be achieved through the Medicare for All Act, we calculate that a single-payer, universal health-care system is likely to lead to a 13% savings in national health-care expenditure, equivalent to more than US$450 billion annually (based on the value of the US$ in 2017). The entire system could be funded with less financial outlay than is incurred by employers and households paying for health-care premiums combined with existing government allocations. This shift to single-payer health care would provide the greatest relief to lower-income households. Furthermore, we estimate that ensuring health-care access for all Americans would save more than 68 000 lives and 1·73 million life-years every year compared with the status quo."
- 542458 6y ago
  That really doesn't have any bearing on the point that the costs of the F-35 and M4A are dramatically different. Funding or not funding the F-35 isn't the determining factor in funding M4A.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- syshum 6y ago
  The Lancet study is very flawed on several economic fronts, the biggest being that it assume the government could tax / collect 100% of spending that Americans do voluntarily today in the private system to devote it to a government run plan. That is completely improbable and unrealistic expectation. it also assumes government run systems will be as or better efficient than private system, we have 100's of years of history (including this very story) the proves that to be a fallacy
- cwhiz 6y ago
  There are dozens of these studies. Vermont tried to implement a single payer system to realize these costs, and it was an epic failure. Read up on it. https://www.vox.com/2014/12/22/7427117/single-payer-vermont-shumlin https://www.vox.com/2014/12/22/7427117/single-payer-vermont-... What people don't seem to understand is that you can't just vacuum money out of a giant industry. The money we spend in health care doesn't go into an incinerator. There are approximately 16.5 million people working in the health care industry. This study assumes we'll save 13%, a wildly optimistic figure, but we'll go with it. Pick the 2.15 million people to fire.
mnd999 6y ago
Healthcare is super expensive in the US though. If the system was more efficient, like European systems, it could work.
joshuamorton 6y ago
> $3.6 trillion per year on health care Yes, and this would decrease, significantly if the us healthcare system were more proactive and more people had good insurance. Not to mention that much of this is what is already spent, so clearly we can afford it. If taxes increased by exactly what your premiums were before, it's revenue neutral.
malcolmgreaves 6y ago
The money will come from folk not paying for private health insurance and wildly expensive hospital bills. No money printer needed.
jjoonathan 6y ago
Sure, if you pretend we aren't already paying for health care and don't credit that against the price of MFA, MFA looks awfully expensive!
- cwhiz 6y ago
  Ah so now we're talking about the elephant in the room, the huge tax hike. Most people pay a percentage of their healthcare costs, their employer covers the rest, and it comes out of pre-tax dollars. We'll still need all that money so now it will have to come in the form of a huge MFA tax on businesses and individuals.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
samstave 6y ago
Just because we SPEND money doesnt mean that the price is VALID. "Medicine" is grossly overpriced. our entire model is FUCKED. Source: designed and built and commissioned several hospitals and an entire family of doctors. Fuck the US health care system and fuck the military-industrial-spyware-congressional-graft system. I was the tech designer for SF General (before Zuck stuck his name on it) (I designed the entire nurse call system there, among many other things) My brother was the head of the VA for Alaska, commander of the 10th medical wing USAF, personal flight surgeon to the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the pentagon. Grandmother was a surgical nurse for decades in Silicon Valley. Top cardiologist in California (and mayor of Saratoga) Aunt is top NICU nurse at El Camino Hospital (which I was TPM on building... Among other many accolades that my family has; we all agree - Healthcare is GROSSLY overpriced and BS. FFS I had to go to the hospital recently and they charged me $4,000 for the ride to the hospital and $12,000 for giving me vitamins and holding me over night. FUCK the medical industry pricing.
- omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
  The business model for healthcare is divorced from the actual healthcare provided. Emergency care for instance tends to be billed at nutty rates. IMO, the best thing to do is to avoid ambulance/emergency if possible, although this isn't always an option and can be risky, and to shop around for everything where possible. Call up your insurance company with codes and provider numbers and find out what everyone around you actually charges for something. Each medical group can also have their own economic models which are optimized for different things. One local group actually has reasonably priced specialty visits, but their outpatient services are crazy expensive ($1000 in-network for a NCS/EMG), and that's how they've structured things. Another semi-public group (University of California based) charges significantly more for visits, but significantly less for outpatient procedures ($1000 for an in-network 3.0T MRI).
markus_zhang 6y ago
That 3.6 trillion dollar, I don't think it's well spent and I wonder how much went to the Insurance companies, big Pharmas. SOmehow as the most powerful country in the world, US has shitty medicare comparing to Canada, Germany, etc.
glaucon 6y ago
Not a USAian but from distant observation I wonder what proporation of the total spend would disappear if you had "socialised medicine". In an ideal world this would be counter-intuitive, because competition usually increases efficiency, but as far as I can tell the provision of medical care in the US suffers from the same legalised near monoplies that many other parts of the US economy do.
grecy 6y ago
> You could take the entire defense budget, and the defense budget from every other country in the world, and you would be less than 50% of the funding you would need for a single year of Medicare for all. How in the world to other countries pay for Healthcare? The USA has tax revenue per capita very similar to New Zealand, the UK, Italy and Canada - all of which have good Healthcare for all. [1] The USA has more than double the tax revenue per capita than South Korea, which also has good healthcare. It's not about the cost, it's about how the USA is choosing to spend it's tax dollars. [1] https://countryeconomy.com/taxes/tax-revenue https://countryeconomy.com/taxes/tax-revenue
- LegitShady 6y ago
  Many countries have far worse standards of care than the US. I live in Canada, and waited more than a year for a specialist. It took me 2 years to find a family doctor with decent reviews who was accepting patients . I needed an MRI once and the wait was measured in months. I waited four months for just a cortisone shot, before the pandemic. I'm not claiming one system is better than another. Certainly if you're wealthy and have good benefits in the US, the standard of care is much much higher. On the flipside, if you need cancer care in Canada you're probably not going to need to declare bankruptcy.
  - grecy 6y ago
    > Many countries have far worse standards of care than the US. I'll need a citation for that. When a country has 29 million people without health insurance [1], and medical bills are the number one cause of bankruptcy, I think it's safe to say the average standard of care is way, way lower than Canada, Australia, Germany, etc. where literally every person gets care. [1] https://www.kff.org/uninsured/issue-brief/key-facts-about-the-uninsured-population/ https://www.kff.org/uninsured/issue-brief/key-facts-about-th...
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - Unklejoe 6y ago

by cwhiz 6y ago

tele 6y ago

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(19)33019-3/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... "Taking into account both the costs of coverage expansion and the savings that would be achieved through the Medicare for All Act, we calculate that a single-payer, universal health-care system is likely to lead to a 13% savings in national health-care expenditure, equivalent to more than US$450 billion annually (based on the value of the US$ in 2017). The entire system could be funded with less financial outlay than is incurred by employers and households paying for health-care premiums combined with existing government allocations. This shift to single-payer health care would provide the greatest relief to lower-income households. Furthermore, we estimate that ensuring health-care access for all Americans would save more than 68 000 lives and 1·73 million life-years every year compared with the status quo."

542458 6y ago
That really doesn't have any bearing on the point that the costs of the F-35 and M4A are dramatically different. Funding or not funding the F-35 isn't the determining factor in funding M4A.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
syshum 6y ago
The Lancet study is very flawed on several economic fronts, the biggest being that it assume the government could tax / collect 100% of spending that Americans do voluntarily today in the private system to devote it to a government run plan. That is completely improbable and unrealistic expectation. it also assumes government run systems will be as or better efficient than private system, we have 100's of years of history (including this very story) the proves that to be a fallacy
cwhiz 6y ago
There are dozens of these studies. Vermont tried to implement a single payer system to realize these costs, and it was an epic failure. Read up on it. https://www.vox.com/2014/12/22/7427117/single-payer-vermont-shumlin https://www.vox.com/2014/12/22/7427117/single-payer-vermont-... What people don't seem to understand is that you can't just vacuum money out of a giant industry. The money we spend in health care doesn't go into an incinerator. There are approximately 16.5 million people working in the health care industry. This study assumes we'll save 13%, a wildly optimistic figure, but we'll go with it. Pick the 2.15 million people to fire.

mnd999 6y ago

Healthcare is super expensive in the US though. If the system was more efficient, like European systems, it could work.

joshuamorton 6y ago

> $3.6 trillion per year on health care Yes, and this would decrease, significantly if the us healthcare system were more proactive and more people had good insurance. Not to mention that much of this is what is already spent, so clearly we can afford it. If taxes increased by exactly what your premiums were before, it's revenue neutral.

malcolmgreaves 6y ago

The money will come from folk not paying for private health insurance and wildly expensive hospital bills. No money printer needed.

jjoonathan 6y ago

Sure, if you pretend we aren't already paying for health care and don't credit that against the price of MFA, MFA looks awfully expensive!

cwhiz 6y ago
Ah so now we're talking about the elephant in the room, the huge tax hike. Most people pay a percentage of their healthcare costs, their employer covers the rest, and it comes out of pre-tax dollars. We'll still need all that money so now it will have to come in the form of a huge MFA tax on businesses and individuals.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

samstave 6y ago

Just because we SPEND money doesnt mean that the price is VALID. "Medicine" is grossly overpriced. our entire model is FUCKED. Source: designed and built and commissioned several hospitals and an entire family of doctors. Fuck the US health care system and fuck the military-industrial-spyware-congressional-graft system. I was the tech designer for SF General (before Zuck stuck his name on it) (I designed the entire nurse call system there, among many other things) My brother was the head of the VA for Alaska, commander of the 10th medical wing USAF, personal flight surgeon to the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the pentagon. Grandmother was a surgical nurse for decades in Silicon Valley. Top cardiologist in California (and mayor of Saratoga) Aunt is top NICU nurse at El Camino Hospital (which I was TPM on building... Among other many accolades that my family has; we all agree - Healthcare is GROSSLY overpriced and BS. FFS I had to go to the hospital recently and they charged me $4,000 for the ride to the hospital and $12,000 for giving me vitamins and holding me over night. FUCK the medical industry pricing.

omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
The business model for healthcare is divorced from the actual healthcare provided. Emergency care for instance tends to be billed at nutty rates. IMO, the best thing to do is to avoid ambulance/emergency if possible, although this isn't always an option and can be risky, and to shop around for everything where possible. Call up your insurance company with codes and provider numbers and find out what everyone around you actually charges for something. Each medical group can also have their own economic models which are optimized for different things. One local group actually has reasonably priced specialty visits, but their outpatient services are crazy expensive ($1000 in-network for a NCS/EMG), and that's how they've structured things. Another semi-public group (University of California based) charges significantly more for visits, but significantly less for outpatient procedures ($1000 for an in-network 3.0T MRI).

markus_zhang 6y ago

That 3.6 trillion dollar, I don't think it's well spent and I wonder how much went to the Insurance companies, big Pharmas. SOmehow as the most powerful country in the world, US has shitty medicare comparing to Canada, Germany, etc.

glaucon 6y ago

Not a USAian but from distant observation I wonder what proporation of the total spend would disappear if you had "socialised medicine". In an ideal world this would be counter-intuitive, because competition usually increases efficiency, but as far as I can tell the provision of medical care in the US suffers from the same legalised near monoplies that many other parts of the US economy do.

grecy 6y ago

> You could take the entire defense budget, and the defense budget from every other country in the world, and you would be less than 50% of the funding you would need for a single year of Medicare for all. How in the world to other countries pay for Healthcare? The USA has tax revenue per capita very similar to New Zealand, the UK, Italy and Canada - all of which have good Healthcare for all. [1] The USA has more than double the tax revenue per capita than South Korea, which also has good healthcare. It's not about the cost, it's about how the USA is choosing to spend it's tax dollars. [1] https://countryeconomy.com/taxes/tax-revenue https://countryeconomy.com/taxes/tax-revenue

LegitShady 6y ago
Many countries have far worse standards of care than the US. I live in Canada, and waited more than a year for a specialist. It took me 2 years to find a family doctor with decent reviews who was accepting patients . I needed an MRI once and the wait was measured in months. I waited four months for just a cortisone shot, before the pandemic. I'm not claiming one system is better than another. Certainly if you're wealthy and have good benefits in the US, the standard of care is much much higher. On the flipside, if you need cancer care in Canada you're probably not going to need to declare bankruptcy.
- grecy 6y ago
  > Many countries have far worse standards of care than the US. I'll need a citation for that. When a country has 29 million people without health insurance [1], and medical bills are the number one cause of bankruptcy, I think it's safe to say the average standard of care is way, way lower than Canada, Australia, Germany, etc. where literally every person gets care. [1] https://www.kff.org/uninsured/issue-brief/key-facts-about-the-uninsured-population/ https://www.kff.org/uninsured/issue-brief/key-facts-about-th...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Unklejoe 6y ago