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This blog's author is a freelance writer and journalist, who is fluent in French and lives in upstate NY.
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Tuesday, May 26, 2009
'Do you want REAL health care?'
Matt Funiciello has another piece explaining his support for sensible (aka: single payer) health care.
5 comments:
Mark
said...
I have no doubt that single payer will be here within a generation or two. Though how we will be able to afford it when social security and medicare truly enter the red baffles me. Guess we'll print more money and raise taxes.
No one inside the avenues of power will ever advocate for or bring about single payer health care. We need to elect some human beings to office who have actually worked for a living before some simple math gets done.
Single payer costs less than we pay right now with universal coverage. What smart countries have done is roll all medical coverages together so there is no overlap. Things like medicare and worker's comp (medical bills) and auto accident insurance are all covered by the same national medical plan. No redundancies.
We will spend $7900 this year per person (250 million covered). Thats just shy of 2 TRILLION dollars!
Universal single payer would cover 300 million at about $5500 - $6000 per person. Thats about $1.75 BILLION.
So, it would actually be cheaper to cover everyone. This is why the powers that be are bribing our politicians so hard. The HMO's currently make between 28-35% in profit and administrative costs. That will be reduced to about 2 or 3% like Medicare's current administrative cost, under a single payer system.
As someone who has dealt with the health care bureaucracy with some of his own medical problems, your analysis is intriguing. But I would very much enjoy seeing Mr. Funiciello's reasoning as to how this passes constitutional muster at all on the federal level. I am not convinced that putting more government regulations and money into our semi-socialized system (as government already pays about 50% of health care costs) into the quagmire is right, financially, legally or philosophically. Why was health care so much more relatively affordable 40, 50 years ago? I have heard that it was federal legislation that helped to essentially "create" the need for HMOs. In essence then, Uncle Sam helped create the problem in the first place. I'd much sooner favor a standardized paperless medical database, which I have read could cut costs by 20-30%, than a full government takeover. But like I said, the momentum is certainly with your movement, as history shows us that goverment power will keep growing. Give it a generation or two.
I got to thinking... the biggest difference between Detroit and foreign automakers is not wages or costs of parts. It's the legacy costs of providing health care and pension to retirees. European and Japanese automakers don't have anywhere near those costs because those things are universal. They are provided to (and funded by) everybody. That gives them a competitive advantage. Foreign automakers may be taxed extra but the rate is stable and predictable, whereas Detroit's costs can vary wildly from contract to contract depending on negotiating skills, unions, economics and other factors.
5 comments:
I have no doubt that single payer will be here within a generation or two.
Though how we will be able to afford it when social security and medicare truly enter the red baffles me. Guess we'll print more money and raise taxes.
Mark,
No one inside the avenues of power will ever advocate for or bring about single payer health care. We need to elect some human beings to office who have actually worked for a living before some simple math gets done.
Single payer costs less than we pay right now with universal coverage. What smart countries have done is roll all medical coverages together so there is no overlap. Things like medicare and worker's comp (medical bills) and auto accident insurance are all covered by the same national medical plan. No redundancies.
We will spend $7900 this year per person (250 million covered). Thats just shy of 2 TRILLION dollars!
Universal single payer would cover 300 million at about $5500 - $6000 per person. Thats about $1.75 BILLION.
So, it would actually be cheaper to cover everyone. This is why the powers that be are bribing our politicians so hard. The HMO's currently make between 28-35% in profit and administrative costs. That will be reduced to about 2 or 3% like Medicare's current administrative cost, under a single payer system.
As someone who has dealt with the health care bureaucracy with some of his own medical problems, your analysis is intriguing. But I would very much enjoy seeing Mr. Funiciello's reasoning as to how this passes constitutional muster at all on the federal level. I am not convinced that putting more government regulations and money into our semi-socialized system (as government already pays about 50% of health care costs) into the quagmire is right, financially, legally or philosophically. Why was health care so much more relatively affordable 40, 50 years ago? I have heard that it was federal legislation that helped to essentially "create" the need for HMOs. In essence then, Uncle Sam helped create the problem in the first place.
I'd much sooner favor a standardized paperless medical database, which I have read could cut costs by 20-30%, than a full government takeover.
But like I said, the momentum is certainly with your movement, as history shows us that goverment power will keep growing. Give it a generation or two.
Correction; I meant to say that a single-payer universal system would cost an estimated $1.75 "trillion" annually, not "billion".
I got to thinking... the biggest difference between Detroit and foreign automakers is not wages or costs of parts. It's the legacy costs of providing health care and pension to retirees. European and Japanese automakers don't have anywhere near those costs because those things are universal. They are provided to (and funded by) everybody. That gives them a competitive advantage. Foreign automakers may be taxed extra but the rate is stable and predictable, whereas Detroit's costs can vary wildly from contract to contract depending on negotiating skills, unions, economics and other factors.
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