alt Hacker NewsYou are extremely close to arriving at the solution, which is medicare for all. Cover everyone, then almost noone uses the insurance except when they need it, which is when they get old.
If the US had the equivalence of Canadian health insurance, the spending reduction would be so big, that as a working person, your health insurance bill would go to zero, out of pocket costs to zero, and everyone would have health insurance.
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> You are extremely close to arriving at the solution, which is medicare for all. Cover everyone, then almost noone uses the insurance except when they need it
Most Medicare recipients do get supplementary private insurance though? It's called "Medigap."
Medicare pays for 80% of patients' costs, but even the remaining 20% is a lot. (You get a $100,000 procedure -- you're on the hook for $20,000.) That's why people get Medigap coverage.
Medicare's admin cost is around 5%, private insurance is around 33% of claim dollars. There are around 27-28% uninsured. The money is already there who pays needs to be moved to the Billionaire and Multimillionaire class to reduce the annual costs for those who work for a living.
The United States will never have universal healthcare because a subset of the population would rather pay more for worse health outcomes than participate in a system the provides abortions, HRT, or PreP, or any healthcare at all to Black people.
See, for example, “Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland” by Jonathan Metzl
> You are extremely close to arriving at the solution, which is medicare for all. Cover everyone, then almost noone uses the insurance except when they need it, which is when they get old.
I strongly think that covering everyone in the existing system is not the best way to go.
The existing system is designed to cost as much as possible, and we have way too much demand for treatment (as is) and not enough supply. ER wait-times aren't 2-4 hours just because.
First, that needs to break.
Then, you can cover everyone.
We simply do not have enough doctors for how many old and unhealthy people we have. We should be thinking about how to keep people from going to the hospital that don't really need to be there. Do you really need to go to the ER because you stubbed your toe? If you didn't have insurance, you'd go to a low-cost clinic and get the same treatment for 1/10th the price.
We are slowly getting there already. Low cost clinics weren't widely available, but they are becoming more and more available as the cost of health care even WITH insurance is too high for most people.
The infrastructure for the bottom ~50% of people needs to exist to break free from a system that is not designed for them BEFORE they can move off it.
It's almost there.
Since One Medical became widely available, I basically have not gone to the hospital in 5+ years. Before, you kind of needed to go even for routine things (or at least I didn't know of a viable alternative). More and more places like this are springing up all over the US.