Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (286265)	5/1/2006 7:28:58 AM
From: Elroy	Respond to of 1590059

They have universal health care in Japan. I had a major surgery due to a bike accident, with a broken arm, broken jaw and broken cheek bone (ouch!!), and spent 24 days in the hospital including 3-4 in intensive care, and the whole thing cost me about $1,300. The results were great, as well.

To: Road Walker who wrote (286265)	11/17/2006 8:34:20 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1590059

Aetna spends less than 80 cents of each dollar in health insurance premiums on actually providing medical care. The other 20 cents go into profits, marketing and administrative expenses. Lets also assume just for a second that Krugman's data is right. What's the savings you could get? Well if government overhead costs where zero (and they wouldn't be) you would save 20%. Now 20% of the costs of medical care is a big deal, certainly enough savings to justify a major change in health insurance but isn't as large as many proponents of nationalized health insurance claim or imply (such as the implication in your posts about how other countries pay half of what we do for health care) And of course it couldn't really be 20% because government has overhead costs as well. The official health overhead of Medicare is below 3%, but it doesn't include all of the costs. It doesn't include money spent by the GSA for infrastructure that Medicare employees use. It doesn't include the cost of the IRS's collection and enforcing of taxes. Then you have the overhead of the carriers and intermediaries who process the claims. "...On an annual basis, carriers and intermediaries process approximately 1 billion claims, with carriers processing Medicare Part B claims and intermediaries generally processing Medicare Part A claims.7 Of this amount, carriers and intermediaries (Parts A and B) approve payment for approximately 900 million claims..." hhs.gov So it appears the the official overhead figures for medicare are not just incomplete, but really almost meaningless. Also I'm pretty sure that the average Medicare payment per month is higher than the average payment by private insurance (for one thing the average person using private insurance is younger). If Medicare pays out more per month per person, the percentage could be lower, without the actual cost being lower. If Medicare was expanded to younger people, the average payment would be less, but most likely the overhead cost per patient would not decline as much, resulting in a higher overhead percentage. And I think the actual overhead costs of private insurers may be less than 20%, but I don't have a real solid figure at this time. Even when considering all of these facts Medicare might still have a lower overhead do to economies of scale, and less flexibility. But there is no way to know this, at least not with the data Krugman provides, or from the official Medicare overhead figures. Meanwhile the lower flexibility is itself a negative. None of which proves that Medicare is not cheaper, but it does effectively refute the idea that Krugman's argument shows that it is cheaper.