4 ms·

The federal site only had 5.5 million people sign up for healthcare. That's $150 per registered user. http://www.businessinsider.com/how-many-people-signed-up

The federal site only had 5.5 million people sign up for healthcare. That's $150 per registered user. http://www.businessinsider.com/how-many-people-signed-up-for-obamacare-2014-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/how-many-people-signed-up-for...

jjoonathan 12y ago
So less than 2 weeks of health care coverage per user. While we're on the subject of waste, the USA's ongoing experiment with market-based health care costs ~20 weeks of coverage per user per year compared to its social counterparts. http://healthcarereform.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=005522#III http://healthcarereform.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourc...
- beat 12y ago
  Market-based isn't the problem. Switzerland, Germany, and Singapore all have mostly-private competition-driven systems (more private than the American model, even), and they are inexpensive and provide high-quality care, along with universal coverage. So private insurers aren't why the American system is so uniquely incompetent and inefficient. So what is the problem? The way I see it, there are two features that really distinguish the American system structurally. First, there's the state-by-state laws and regulations, resulting in effectively 51 different legal regimes. Second, American insurance is provided primarily through employers, rather than purchased individually. In fact, non-employer insurance is prohibitively expensive and often impossible to get. I think the employer role is a much more likely cause of problems than the state laws, which are mostly consistent. Worse, tying insurance to employment traps people in jobs they hate - a distinctly un-American outcome. So anyway, I used to think a more socialist system was the right answer too, until I looked more closely at the working systems in the world. It's not that one particular model works, because there are lots of models in use in other countries and they all work fine. It's that one model doesn't work - what we have in America.
  - waps 12y ago
    I was going to say something about how the US market is a lot bigger than the Swiss market, but I've had to reconsider. Switzerland is a country of 6 million people and is about the size of an "average" US state. Most US states are a little smaller in population (If Switzerland was a US state, it'd be the 13th largest), and a LOT larger in area. So for a "normal" state, Switzerland actually has a bigger healthcare market. California, about 5 times the size of the Swiss healthcare market, still manages to screw things up royally though. People are often blaming the US legal rules. In Switzerland, if you want to win a court case that a MD acted improperly (justifying damages), you have to get a jury of his peers (ie. MDs) to agree on that (which is not impossible, but ...). In the US, you have to get a jury of patients to agree on that. Needless to say, there are many, many more medical cases in the US, with spectacular damage payments (damage payments are also standardized in the EU. If an MD kills you through negligence or outright a mistake (not satisfying the level of a criminal act), his employer (even though they're mostly freelancers, this is an exception in the law) owes your family 300k euro (inflation adjusted since 19xx, so it's a bit more). In the US, it's not fixed, judges decide, but it seems that number runs into the tens of millions of dollars.
    - jjoonathan 12y ago
      Malpractice insurance in the USA accounts for <2% of our medical expenditures [1]. If you ask any doctor they'll tell you it's responsible for our price overruns, but that's because it's a cost that is directly visible to them not because it actually accounts for a large fraction of the excessive cost of our care. Less charitably, we should also note that it's a self-serving argument, and although MDs are typically good people that mean well they aren't immune from the human tendency to base our beliefs on the "maximum convenience principle" :) [1] http://www.justice.org/cps/rde/justice/hs.xsl/8686.htm http://www.justice.org/cps/rde/justice/hs.xsl/8686.htm
      - waps 12y ago
        I didn't know that. Thanks.
  - 12y ago
mikeyouse 12y ago
And the site will also continue to enroll users and provide service for years to come.. Does Ford amortize the cost of a factory on the first year's production?
Daishiman 12y ago
That's not a lot, actually.

jjoonathan 12y ago

So less than 2 weeks of health care coverage per user. While we're on the subject of waste, the USA's ongoing experiment with market-based health care costs ~20 weeks of coverage per user per year compared to its social counterparts. http://healthcarereform.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=005522#III http://healthcarereform.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourc...

beat 12y ago
Market-based isn't the problem. Switzerland, Germany, and Singapore all have mostly-private competition-driven systems (more private than the American model, even), and they are inexpensive and provide high-quality care, along with universal coverage. So private insurers aren't why the American system is so uniquely incompetent and inefficient. So what is the problem? The way I see it, there are two features that really distinguish the American system structurally. First, there's the state-by-state laws and regulations, resulting in effectively 51 different legal regimes. Second, American insurance is provided primarily through employers, rather than purchased individually. In fact, non-employer insurance is prohibitively expensive and often impossible to get. I think the employer role is a much more likely cause of problems than the state laws, which are mostly consistent. Worse, tying insurance to employment traps people in jobs they hate - a distinctly un-American outcome. So anyway, I used to think a more socialist system was the right answer too, until I looked more closely at the working systems in the world. It's not that one particular model works, because there are lots of models in use in other countries and they all work fine. It's that one model doesn't work - what we have in America.
- waps 12y ago
  I was going to say something about how the US market is a lot bigger than the Swiss market, but I've had to reconsider. Switzerland is a country of 6 million people and is about the size of an "average" US state. Most US states are a little smaller in population (If Switzerland was a US state, it'd be the 13th largest), and a LOT larger in area. So for a "normal" state, Switzerland actually has a bigger healthcare market. California, about 5 times the size of the Swiss healthcare market, still manages to screw things up royally though. People are often blaming the US legal rules. In Switzerland, if you want to win a court case that a MD acted improperly (justifying damages), you have to get a jury of his peers (ie. MDs) to agree on that (which is not impossible, but ...). In the US, you have to get a jury of patients to agree on that. Needless to say, there are many, many more medical cases in the US, with spectacular damage payments (damage payments are also standardized in the EU. If an MD kills you through negligence or outright a mistake (not satisfying the level of a criminal act), his employer (even though they're mostly freelancers, this is an exception in the law) owes your family 300k euro (inflation adjusted since 19xx, so it's a bit more). In the US, it's not fixed, judges decide, but it seems that number runs into the tens of millions of dollars.
  - jjoonathan 12y ago
    Malpractice insurance in the USA accounts for <2% of our medical expenditures [1]. If you ask any doctor they'll tell you it's responsible for our price overruns, but that's because it's a cost that is directly visible to them not because it actually accounts for a large fraction of the excessive cost of our care. Less charitably, we should also note that it's a self-serving argument, and although MDs are typically good people that mean well they aren't immune from the human tendency to base our beliefs on the "maximum convenience principle" :) [1] http://www.justice.org/cps/rde/justice/hs.xsl/8686.htm http://www.justice.org/cps/rde/justice/hs.xsl/8686.htm
    - waps 12y ago
      I didn't know that. Thanks.
- 12y ago

mikeyouse 12y ago

And the site will also continue to enroll users and provide service for years to come.. Does Ford amortize the cost of a factory on the first year's production?

Daishiman 12y ago

That's not a lot, actually.