I don't think anybody is arguing that the US healthcare system is in a good way. It's preposterously overpriced. But people are peddling nonsense like "just extend Medicare to everyone" as if 90% of the excessive costs have anything to do with that.
We need to solve the actual problems, which is going to eliminate a lot of wasteful healthcare-related jobs, which makes it hard to do. But we still need to do that instead of proposing things that sound like they wouldn't do that but in practice would either do it anyway because it's not "Medicare for all" but "Medicare for all plus seven other things" and it's the seven other things doing all the work, or wouldn't do that and correspondingly wouldn't actually work.
"just extend Medicare to everyone" as if 90% of the excessive costs have anything to do with that.
> We need to solve the actual problems, which is going to eliminate a lot of wasteful healthcare-related jobs
Medicare for All virtually eliminates the private insurers, a significant part of waste in providing healtcare.
Private insurers are not a significant part of the waste in providing healthcare.
Their total profits are around 5% of premiums, which isn't even a dent in the problem even if you attribute no part of them to legitimate value such as taking the risk that actual claims will closely match actuarial expectations even when there may be unexpected events such as regulatory changes.
And their other costs are things that would either still be present with Medicare or provide legitimate value. One of the major costs is that they make consumers price insensitive, encouraging everyone to do unnecessary tests etc., which Medicare only makes worse. They also require doctors to do more paperwork, but the purpose of the paperwork is to reduce the incidence of those unnecessary tests and procedures and to defend against fraud. Medicare can eliminate those administrative costs by increasing the incidence of unnecessary test and undetected fraud, but that does not result in an overall reduction in costs.
Comments
I don't think anybody is arguing that the US healthcare system is in a good way. It's preposterously overpriced. But people are peddling nonsense like "just extend Medicare to everyone" as if 90% of the excessive costs have anything to do with that.
We need to solve the actual problems, which is going to eliminate a lot of wasteful healthcare-related jobs, which makes it hard to do. But we still need to do that instead of proposing things that sound like they wouldn't do that but in practice would either do it anyway because it's not "Medicare for all" but "Medicare for all plus seven other things" and it's the seven other things doing all the work, or wouldn't do that and correspondingly wouldn't actually work.
Medicare for All virtually eliminates the private insurers, a significant part of waste in providing healtcare.
Private insurers are not a significant part of the waste in providing healthcare.
Their total profits are around 5% of premiums, which isn't even a dent in the problem even if you attribute no part of them to legitimate value such as taking the risk that actual claims will closely match actuarial expectations even when there may be unexpected events such as regulatory changes.
And their other costs are things that would either still be present with Medicare or provide legitimate value. One of the major costs is that they make consumers price insensitive, encouraging everyone to do unnecessary tests etc., which Medicare only makes worse. They also require doctors to do more paperwork, but the purpose of the paperwork is to reduce the incidence of those unnecessary tests and procedures and to defend against fraud. Medicare can eliminate those administrative costs by increasing the incidence of unnecessary test and undetected fraud, but that does not result in an overall reduction in costs.