What Single Payer Health Care Would Cost

[irishbobcat]

You guys are so wrong....

[Rick Rowlands]

Its human nature to take the path of least resistance.  Capitalism and free markets demand that those who do take that path go out of business and that those who go above and beyond will reap rewards.  Government is not built on that system. Govt. has minimum performance standards which have to be met, but any performance beyond that minimum is not rewarded, and sometimes is actually punished.  That is the basic reason why whenever the public interacts with govt. service is poor and lines are long.  I still contend that the root cause of the healthcare mess has been the third party payer system where customers (patients) do not have to make value decisions that they make every day when they actually have to shell out the cash to buy a product.

If your car needs fuel and there are two gas stations next to each other and one has gas for $3.55 and the other for $3.65, which one do you go to?  If there are two MRI clinics next to each other and one charges $200 and the other $300, which do you choose?  Any prudent person would purchase the $3.55 gasoline, but since you are insulated from the true cost of the MRI you would probably go to the first one that you find.  You won't even compare prices because its of no concern to you.  Neither of the MRI clinics have any pressure on them to be competitive on prices. 

Now lets take this little scenario and apply it to the gas stations.  Lets say you have third party pay on gasoline.  Now which station will you go to?  Your copay is $1.00 per gallon so it won't matter to you which station gets your business.  They could now charge $4.00 per gallon and you won't give a damn because all you do is pay $1.00 per gallon and someone else subsidizes the rest.  Station owners and oil companies would continually raise prices and since the consumer, the only person with veto power over that behavior, no longer cares about cost.

[Dan Moadus]

I must admit, the idea appeals to me, as I have seen people who couldn't afford health care insurance terrified of getting sick. I get all of my health care through the VA and feel very fortunate for the top notch care.

The only problem I have with single payer universal health care, is that it has been a failure wherever it's been tried. The proponents can cite study after study of how good the care is and how affordable the cost is, but the reality of it in the world is one of unaffordability, substandard care, and rationing. While leftist like Dennis tout it's greatness, many countries are fleeing from it because they tried for years to make it work and couldn't. Somehow, the left doesn't notice this

[irishbobcat]

Research Desk: How much would single-payer cost?
By Dylan Matthews

H.R. 676, better known as the "Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act" or "United States National Health Care Act," was first introduced by Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) in 2003, and has been introduced in every Congress since. As its first name implies, it creates a single-payer health-care system by enrolling all Americans in Medicare. This would be financed through administrative savings, negotiating down prices with providers and drug manufacturers, and a few new taxes, including a payroll tax, an income tax surcharge for high earners, and a financial transactions tax. Hospitals would have to go nonprofit, and private insurers would be banned from providing coverage similar to Medicare's.

The bill got some attention last Congress, when single-payer advocates presented it as their alternative to bills coming from the House and Senate leadership, and the Congressional Budget Office looked set to score the bill. This was because then-Rep. Anthony Weiner got the House leadership to commit to giving H.R. 676 a floor vote. The CBO is required to score bills that are reported out of committee in either chamber, so such a vote would have required it to score H.R. 676. But because Nancy Pelosi and other House leaders thought a single-payer vote would hurt the chances of passing the main health reform bill, they rebuffed Weiner and the floor vote didn't come, H.R. 676 never made it out of committee, and thus the CBO was not required to score it. It sometimes provides estimates for bills that have not made it out of committee, but in this case, it did not.

But that doesn't mean there aren't data on the budgetary impact of greatly expanding publicly-provided health care. In 2007 and 2009, Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.) introduced the "AmeriCare Health Care Act," which would automatically enroll Americans in a Medicare-like public plan at birth and allow employers to choose between covering their employees or paying into the public plan to cover them.

The plan would be financed through these employee contributions as well as premiums and state contributions equal to their previous spending on Medicaid and S-CHIP, which would be rolled into the public plan. Unlike H.R. 676, the AmeriCare bill doesn't force providers to go nonprofit, and, importantly, it maintains a role for private insurers. People are free to opt out of the public plan and keep their employer-based health plan if they wish. This means it's not a single-payer plan, but it's the closest thing for which we have reliable numbers.

Those numbers come courtesy of the Commonwealth Fund, which commissioned the Lewin Group to take a look at AmeriCare and a few other health-care proposals in 2009. The resulting study predicts that, because of a public plan's lower provider reimbursement rates and administrative costs, as well as its ability to negotiate down drug prices, enacting the bill would have resulted in $58.1 billion less annual health spending in 2010. It would increase the federal deficit by $188.5 billion a year, and employers would pay $61.5 billion more annually, but state and local governments would save $83.6 billion, and households a whopping $224.5 billion.

The AmeriCare bill would cover all the uninsured, leaving 85 percent of all Americans enrolled in the public plan, 10 percent in Medicare, and only 2.1 percent in employer plans.