Op/ed on the subject but with numbers. I know that others think the 2% overhead for Medicare is not realistic and I've heard on the outside it could be as high as 9% but it's still LOWER than private insurance while not cherry picking and while having a more user-intensive system.
"...The health-care crisis is real. As a nation, we spend twice as much as others and get worse outcomes. The U.S. spends $2 trillion per year, or 15 percent of our total output, on health care while other industrialized countries spend only six to 10 percent. Using an outcomes-based test, our infant mortality is higher than even some Latin American countries, our life expectancy is less than other rich countries, 15 percent of our people lack insurance, lawyers are undermining physicians, and medical bills are bankrupting even insured workers.
How bad is it? The U.S. spent $6,102 per person on health care in 2004 while Canada spent $3,165, France $3,159 and Australia $3,120, and 47 million people are not covered at all. We have a broken system.
When we round up the usual suspects, we blame soaring health-care costs on new and expensive technology, an aging population, rising expectations, lawyers and soaring drug costs in an ever-more-drug-focused therapy. The problem, aside from our peculiarly litigious nature, is that the rest of the industrialized world shares these “causes” but does not share anything near America’s cost problems.
To begin an intelligent debate, we have to isolate what is different about the American system that makes it the world’s highest-cost system with some of the world’s worst outcomes.
Two things pop up: the administrative costs of our multi-payer system and the control of prices by our suppliers. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, 30 percent, or $600 billion, of that $2 trillion we spend per year on health care goes for the administration, marketing and profits associated with a multiplicity of insurance collectors and payers. Medicare, a single-payer system, and much of the rest of the world pays as little as two percent in administrative costs.
The provision that forbids Medicare to negotiate prices is probably the most absurd thing in these last six years of this government of the absurd. Maybe even worse, the U.S. government pays for the research then gives the patents to the drug companies and research firms and lets them charge monopoly prices.
Medicare, at least Part A–Hospitalization, is the quintessential single-payer system: you choose your own doctor while medical practices, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies remain privately owned and compete. The government acts only as the payer. Part B–Medical, with its confusion of firms and forms, is an unnecessary concession to the insurance companies. ...
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