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Or lower the age for Medicare every year until everyone is covered.
by wombatpm 9mo ago
Or lower the age for Medicare every year until everyone is covered.
- SpaceNoodled 9mo agoWe could just lower it once, to zero, and be done with it.
- WalterBright 9mo agoWe could. Who is going to pay that bill?
- arcticbull 9mo agoWell 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-spending-u-s-compare-countries/ 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.
- 8note 9mo agowould 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
- WalterBright 9mo agoEstimates of Medicare errors, fraud and abuse are around $60 billion. Greatly increasing the scope of it will, inevitably, increase that figure.
- gusgus01 9mo agoEstimates 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.
- wombatpm 9mo agoI 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.
- ethbr1 9mo agoThe US healthcare system is like the Titanic: it turns slowly, and you don't want to fuck around with hitting icebergs.
- SpaceNoodled 9mo agoSo fucking sink it. All heath "insurers" do is just delay and deny coverage anyway.
- ethbr1 9mo ago> So fucking sink it Let's think through the implications of that. The US healthcare system is non-functional for a month: what happens? Hospitals and providers start running into cash flow problems and begin having difficulties providing service. Fraud skyrockets because everything is getting blanket-approved because none of the data used for verification is available. And about a month after that, people start dying from lack of care, after the last financial reserves of the system are exhausted. Because that's the path the system was on when Change went down for several weeks, only averted by HHS/CMS saying 'Here's money, just do procedures, we'll worry about it later.'
- SpaceNoodled 9mo agoYou say this as if people aren't already dying of lack of care. And it's already disintegrating. Check back up in your estimated month as the realities of ACA subsidy drops start to kick in.
- ethbr1 9mo agoI can't tell if you're being intentionally obtuse, or you really don't understand orders of magnitude. Are you okay with 1000x as many people dying to make a point?
- SpaceNoodled 9mo agoMaintaining the status quo just keeps killing people at an increasing rate. The sooner the system is unfucked, the fewer senseless deaths there will be overall.