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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (1851)	8/13/2007 7:51:00 PM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 42652

re: * Medicare's capital costs - Medicare benefits are paid from payroll taxes and general revenues. Medicare has done its share to run-up the federal debt in its 40 years. In 2004, Medicare costs comprised about 12% of federal non-interest spending. Using that factor to represent Medicare's portion of government operations, Medicare's share of government debt service costs would have been $19 billion in 2004. Adding this cost would have boosted Medicare's administrative costs to just under 10%. What BS. Because Medicare was 12% in 2004 it incurs 12% of the entire US debt payment? I doubt it. The debt was run up long before. re: * Medicare pays health care claims for seniors which tend to cost a lot more than the average claim cost for a younger person thereby distorting any comparison between under-age-65 costs and those over age-65. For example, Humana reported its first quarter 2007 medical cost ratio to be 89.3% for its senior business. That is a lot closer to the Medicare expense ratio than I would expect most favoring a single-payer system would think. If Medicare had more young people it's expenses would be LOWER, not higher. More BS. re: * Medicare generally uses payment strategies to control costs (it just cuts payments). While it is starting to do things like disease management, that is a very small part of what it does to control costs. If Medicare had the whole system, it wouldn't benefit from the spill-over impact of private sector programs to control waste and would have to build and operate its own on a much broader scale. That would run its cost ratio up considerably. Insurance companies use automatic declines to control costs (and raise admin costs... they pay commissions for the most declines, however undeserved). They do VIRTUALLY NOTHING with preventative care... they could "care" less. So "Moving from looking at the issue in theory to actual analysis of the costs the costs look pretty similar." That analysis is the worst I've seen. As far as salaries, you can hire a bunch of paper shufflers for these prices: forbes.com