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Politics : The Trump Presidency -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: denizen48 who wrote (22148)	6/20/2017 3:49:39 PM
From: Lane3	2 Recommendations Recommended By i-node TimF Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 360688

The back of the envelope wrt Berniecare: First step is to deduct from the US per capita annual healthcare cost the savings from doing away with multiple insurers. Based on the OECD data, that's a few hundred dollars per person per year. You're still by far the most expensive system in the world. Single payer gets rid of a lot of insurance overhead plus gives you leverage over the prices you pay so the second step is to squeeze providers by reducing payments to them by about 30% to get the cost per patient down to that of the next most expensive country. Lotsa luck with that. You can give up here or keep going. Spoiler alert: the rest of the movement is all back up. When you throw in universal coverage you have to add the demand cost of all the newly insured, whatever percent of the population that is, so you're back up whatever percent, give or take. And then you throw in free at point of delivery and just imagine what happens to demand and resultant expense. Assuming all your providers didn't all change careers after you tried to squeeze them by 30%, in which case supply would limit demand. At which point you choke on the potential delta between the US and the rest of the pack, throw up your hands, and toss the envelope if you haven't already, seems to me. If you don't, then you have to proceed to figure out how you're going to sell the cost to the taxpayers and/or ration what is provided to patients. I shudder at the thought...