Medicare For All?

[TakeYouToTasker]

I always get a good chuckle any time I hear/read a liberal making an impassioned argument about the merits of a true market monopoly.

Edited August 11, 2017 by TakeYouToTasker

[unbillievable]

We negotiate fair prices and invest in the next generation of healthcare, in terms of education and R&D.

 

You immediately lose the debate with the use of "fair". No human is capable of determining this figure. Everything afterwards is built on this BS word. You might as well have said we're going to use unicorns to distribute the medicine.

[ExiledInIllinois]

Trump's stealth healthcare plan, "Medicare for All."

 

From January of this year:

 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnwasik/2017/01/20/trumps-stealth-health-plan-could-be-medicare-for-all/

[4merper4mer]

We negotiate fair prices and invest in the next generation of healthcare, in terms of education and R&D.

The American system has costs that other single-payer nations don't have. Hospitals & doctor offices here have 4x the billing staff due to complex insurance coding. Insurance companies operate on a 20-30% overhead (profit), this money doesn't go into care. Medicare's overhead is in the single digits.

So there are cost savings due to the government being able to negotiate prices with Pharma & directly with hospitals & physicians. It works in Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Japan, South Korea & the U.K..

Another reason costs come down is the risk pool expands to the entire country. If we had one insurance company and mandated everyone pay into it, and that insurer had monopoly control of the market it would work in a similar way in terms of price negotiation with doctors and Pharma. I'm not advocating for a single-payer / private for profit insurer system just saying in theory it would function similar in terms of price discovery.

As far as expanding our national investment into healthcare I think we should do that. Make healthcare a much bigger priority. Make public college free including up to doctorate level. Dramatically invest in the next generation of doctors and nurses, and biologists. That leads to the next generation of doctors and innovation.

OMFG

[B-Man]

http://www.macleans.ca/society/should-doctors-be-paid-a-premium-for-assisted-deaths/

 

From the Maclean’s article:

 

All in, a MAID [medical assistance in dying, e.g., lethal injection] provider can claim a maximum of $440. That would be a hefty paycheque for a couple hours’ work if that was indeed all the time it took to assess a patient and administer the fatal dose. In reality, it takes much longer…

 

The amount of time it all takes varies wildly from patient to patient, says Daws, but most providers say it takes a minimum of three and a half hours. In that time, a family doctor could earn double the MAID rate by doing routine office work, and many specialists could earn triple that amount at their day job.

 

 

So.................even “passionate” euthanasia-supporting doctors are refusing to kill patients because they are not paid enough.

 

It’s not sustainable,” says Daws, who describes herself as a “hard-core, passionate-to-the-bone” assisted-dying advocate.

 

Last week alone, she turned down three patients who wanted the service because she couldn’t afford to do it. “It’s not for lack of wanting,” she says, “but it’s financial suicide.”

 

 

 

The article points out that euthanasia saves a lot of money for the country’s single-payer system–which should be a warning but isn’t once euthanasia consciousness takes hold:

 

According to the Canadian Medical Association, assisted dying could cut health care costs by at least $34.7 million and up to $138.8 million a year in Canada.

[Dr.Sack]

Oh lookie here, employer healthcare costs expected to rise 5% next year.

 

http://money.cnn.com/2017/08/12/news/economy/health-care-workers/index.html