alt Hacker NewsA lot of the reason hospitals have to charge so much is that they take massive losses on uninsured people in emergency rooms. Medicare for all means they don't have to treat anyone for free.
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No, this absolutely does not explain the US's wildly off-base per-capita expenditure because uninsured people still go in the denominator of the per-capita figure! I'm sure the per-insured-capita figure is worse but that's not what we are comparing!
Americans are constantly trying to exclude uninsured people from their statistics (and, worse, from the care itself) but the comparable countries don't do this so it is utterly ridiculous to propose that the correct statistical comparison is one in which the US excludes the undesirables while other countries don't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...
Total health spending per capita in PPP$
2024 2023 2022
United States 14,885 13,818 12,898
Switzerland 9,963 9,301 9,089
Norway 9,393 8,909 8,533
Germany 9,365 8,503 8,652
Netherlands 8,436 7,615 7,517
Austria 8,401 7,697 7,700
Luxembourg 8,087 7,173 6,854
Sweden 7,871 7,364 6,977
Ireland 7,813 7,027 6,748
Belgium 7,750 7,178 6,906
Australia 7,469 7,015 6,907That claim is at odds with the working paper's methodology, which gets a good chunk of the $1T in savings it discussed by assuming very sharp cuts to practitioner compensation.
Uncompensated care attributable from uninsured patients is ~2–3% of operating revenue/costs. So it's there but not massive.
A lot of the rest of the reasons are carrying the deadweight of administering regulation, and dancing with the existing and prospective malpractice suits that randomly benefit the system sometimes, but always cost everybody, and warp the practice of medicine and patient healthcare experiences.
It also means that emergency rooms can be used just for emergencies and ongoing and preventative care can happen in clinics. Cheaper to operate and preventing preventable emergencies lowers the load.
They are not taking any losses; they just charge the regular price with a very tiny profit margin. US healthcare costs are heavily inflated. Insurance is a scam that lets the rich get richer. All insurance should be non-profit.
We all contribute to the pool at a time when we don't need it so we can use the money when we do, not to make CEOs or stockholders rich. That is how an insurance pool should work. Any excess money at the end of the year should be moved to the pool for the next year, not as a bonus on CEOs' 100m+ salary.