alt Hacker NewsYes, I consider big numbers like this to be red flags.
The GDP of the US is $32T. Saving $1T will essentially make 3% of the US economy vanish. You don't vanish 3% of an economy without wide ranging repercussion, it would be a crisis similar in scale to that of 2008.
With such numbers we are not "saving money", these are about rebuilding an entire economy, a painful process. So either the effect will be much smaller than that, or there will be riots.
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Only the American mind can comprehend leading to the deaths of tens of thousands of your own people for the sake of 3% of your economy. As long as the line goes up.
If we're taking the $1T figure seriously, let's take the other figure seriously too. Let's slash it to be more conservative while we're at it and say it would only save 90k lives. Do you think 3% of your economy is worth sacrificing to prevent the equivalent of 30 9/11s? And that's before considering that other people here already explained how these 3% are offset by other gains - if not completely then still substantially.
We're quick to want to automate trucking, manufacturing, even knowledge jobs and say "ooh but the horse shoe maker became the tire installer" but the pointless middleman jobs making everyone's health worse seems to be the line in the sand for job automation.
You can't touch the legions of people who exist to make things more expensive.
The US spends more than 16% of GDP on health. The UK around 11%.
Shrinking US health expenditure by 3% of GDP while roughly maintaining health outcomes is eminently, obviously doable.
> these are about rebuilding an entire economy, a painful process.
"Sorry kids, can't turn off the Orphan Grinder 9000, there's a whole supply chain behind it that would have to restructure."
The money doesn't vanish. It stays in the hands of people. People who would spend it on other things, feeding it into the wider economy instead of the pockets of a small number of corporations. There's zero reason to think this would result in anyone rioting except maybe insurance company CEOs.
Well it wouldn't "vanish". The $1T savings (if produced) that were once spent on healthcare would instead be spent on anything else.
This seems a lot like the parable of the broken window but for inefficiency rather than destruction per se.
I mean there's flavors of contributions to gdp. Spending money on make work for people digging holes still counts. I wouldn't mind 1 trilly being freed up for more effective use. I imagine we could get pretty good returns on it just paying it against the debt as a simple idea, effectively a tax cut.
This is broken window fallacy. The $1T not wasted on healthcare inefficiencies would be spent/invested on other things, creating jobs there. Yes, there would be churn because a good number of people involved in the bureaucracy of private health insurance would lose their job and possibly their career. But these things get smoothed out. Social supports (should) exist to dampen the effects of such churn and keep the economy agile.