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Bad Tux
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Bad commented on the article |I should perhaps have made it clear that I was talking about lavish funding *compared to other single-payer systems*. The current US system is so ridiculously ludicrously expensive that even if you over-funded a single-payer system to replace it by a ludicrous amount, you'd still save over $600B/year on our annual $2.3T health care costs.
BTW, I am aware of your absolute dollar costs but I prefer to use the percentage of GDP as a more accurate measure of the national affordability of a health system. France spends half as much as the US in absolute dollar amounts, but around 10.5% of their GDP vs. around 15.5% for the US so in terms of affordability they are at about 2/3rds the cost of the US. The US economy is much larger in absolute per-capita terms so if we funded a single-payer system at 10.5% of GDP we would still be funding much more lavishly than the French.
My main concern with the House plan is that it is nowhere near as efficient as Medicare For All at solving the affordability problem. But as I noted, it's a plan I can live with -- literally.
[And yes, I had a brain fart on the Japan thing, I knew better :} ]
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Bad commented on the article |
Medicare For All would certainly be a massive savings. Even if we funded it lavishly like the French and Japanese do (and got their results, which are amongst the best in the world with no waiting lists and ready access to the latest medical technology), we would still save at least 5% of GDP on health care costs due to lower administrative costs and ease of controlling costs w/the massive bargaining power of a client pool consisting of the entire population of the USA. And Medicare For All would not require an 850 page bill to guarantee universal medical care for all Americans. However, Democrats in their Presidential primary voted against the only candidate proposing Medicare For All and instead voted for the candidate proposing the weakest medical plan of all the Democratic candidates. Obama is just giving us what he promised (actually a little better than he promised). If you're a Democrat and you voted for Obama in the primaries, congratulations -- this is what you voted for.
In the meantime, this is what the President promised, what the President wants, and it's a bill I can live with -- literally, since I'm approaching my 50's and right now health insurance is basically unobtainium and as a single male I do not qualify for Medicaid under current law. I would leave off a couple of "very" in the title but if this bill makes it through largely as-is without being gutted, it would be a very fine bill indeed. Not perfect, but little is when it comes to politics...
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Bad commented on the article |
It doesn't have a bill number yet because it hasn't gone through the CBO yet, but the draft is on the Education and Labor Committee's web site. Don't know if this link will go thru:
http://edlabor.house.gov/blog/2009/06/health-care-reform-house-dems.shtml
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Bad commented on the article |
Well, it fills the biggest coverage holes at least. I'll have to see what the "administrative simplification" stuff looks like, if it requires insurers to adopt a common set of forms, codes, and procedures that could be a big savings for solo practitioners who currently are spending as much as 40% of their gross revenue on administrative assistants dealing with the insurance mess (the EMR provision on the other hand will not do much other than enrich EMR vendors according to my mother, who has been a practitioner for forty years). I am dubious that you will be able to keep the private insurers from using the public option as a dumping ground for patients they don't want though. Do you really think a few slap-on-the-wrist fines are going to stop them from somehow finding some way to drive out sick patients and only covering the well ones, thus driving up the expenses of the public option to unsustainable levels?
So I guess it's a big "Oh well" for me. It's actually better than Obama's proposed plan during the campaign, which I heavily criticized at the time (I much preferred Edwards' and Clintons' proposals and indeed this looks surprisingly similar to their proposals), so we can't say that Obama didn't deliver what he promised. He did, and more, if this is the bill that eventually makes it to his desk. Hopefully it makes it through the Senate and gets signed in a timely manner.
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