Merry Christmas! Health Care for All with NO NEW TAXES.
Submitted by Robert P. on Tue, 12/05/2006 - 12:47pm
Woe is the JLF, for the poor timing of their pitiful attack on Universal Health Care (a.k.a. Health Care for All), or "Welfare" as JLF likes to call it, they planned it for the same week that a brilliant analysis on what we already spend for Health Care in the US comes out. The New York Times has an article describing how much health care is already paid with tax dollars, tax subsidies, and the like. Guess what?
"So government accounts for about two-thirds of health care spending,"
What! Well, that is just outrageous. The government pays for 2/3 of health care in this country, but only covers about 1/3 of the population. Why? Because the insurance industry is supposed to work like this. You insure the entire population. The healthy people pay for the care for the sick. That's why it is "insurance". The private insurance companies, however, have cherry-picked the healthiest individuals for coverage. Thus, they only pay 1/3 of the total cost to cover the "healthy" 2/3 of our society. The rest?
Well, when you get really ill and need a lot of care, they dump you. Then, after you lose everything you have ever worked for, you come under the coverage of...the taxpayers. Think about who the public finances: the elderly, the infirm, the handicapped, the extremely poor. All high-expense populations.
The kicker to this study is that 2/3 of what we spend per capita already comes from taxes and subsidies. Even then, we still leave 47 million Americans uninsured and 16 million UNDERinsured. Yet, for 67% of what we spend per capita, many European countries have a national health care plan that covers every individual.
The conclusion?
Thus the contention that we cannot afford the taxes to pay for a universal system is untrue; we are already paying them. We merely need to establish a financing system that would spend these same funds much more efficiently so that we can include everyone.
That's right, we could implement a European national health care plan without paying ONE MORE CENT than they do already. What would happen is that there would be a redistribution of who is paying and who is not, and that all workers would be paying for health care and actually receiving it. Compared to now, where working families make up 78% of the uninsured, and they pay for the health insurance of 64 million Americans through Medicaid, Medicare, military benefits, and government employees - but have none of their own.
The debate is over, we NOW pay enough for a national health care plan, all we have to do is realign who pays what and who is in charge of the system.
- Robert P.'s blog
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I'm sure that JLF
would suggest we do away with the public expenditures and that the free market will provide good coverage at low costs and a sippy cup of milk each night to all those 47 million uninsured.
If only we had LESS regulation!
CountryCrats - my thoughts, my blog.
a way to argue
Use their xenophobia against them.
"America is the best country in the world. Right now we are paying more for less. If all these other countries are providing better care while paying less money then we should be able to do better than them. Obviously our current system is broke. If it wasnt broke the damn Europeans wouldnt be doing better than us."
HelpLarry.com
Agreed
It seems the Dutch are good at something other than legalizing prostitution and pot - they have better health care, cheaper than we do.
: )
CountryCrats - my thoughts, my blog.
Wingers want poor people to stay poor and be oppressed
so they can dominate them and feel superior. And get their drive-thru meals really really cheap and fast.
Happy New Year and o/t, but...
...Raw Story headline reads Sen. Dole won't seek re-election, according to the blogger who first revealed the Foley e-mails. Apparently the recent election cycle left her "demoralized." Anyone know if this has been confirmed any further?
Conscious evolution, it's what turns me on. There's got to be a difference between right and wrong.-DTB
mind making this a blog entry with some details?
I'd love to, but too busy. This could be important.
CountryCrats - my thoughts, my blog.
Wait...
...she denies the report. Hmmmm....
Conscious evolution, it's what turns me on. There's got to be a difference between right and wrong.-DTB
Please forgive...
...I'm out the door to the high school for child retrieval! Just read a short article posted on Raw Story and no sooner had I posted my first comment, the headline changed to her denial. Sorry...didn't mean to be so short.
Conscious evolution, it's what turns me on. There's got to be a difference between right and wrong.-DTB
Hey, Richard P. Just returning the visit.
If this is NC, why is it below freezing outside? When I lived in Knoxville TN early December was still above freezi... oh, wait, I just touched the back of my computer, its starting to get through. Not tropical, but definitely warmer than NE Ohio.
Ezra Klein wrote on the same topic. Someone else remarked
I put up a comment on using a specific pot of money to get a basic Universal Coverage system going, kind of with the idea of getting it going first and then working to redirect money that is currently spent and much of it wasted in the current system, since its easier to convince people to start crossing the river when there is already a bridge in place ...
And then after saving the comment and turning it into a diary at Blog.OneAmericaCommittee, Robert P commented there that he had written on the same topic here.
And anyway, the article is exactly right, but getting people who receive coverage inefficiently now to switch to a new system because the hoped for cost savings will allow us to cover them plus another 10's of millions uninsured, plus reduce health care cost inflation that is hurting employers ... that's a big ask. The "put all the money in one pot and then go from there" seems to me like a recipe to never getting the pot on the fire.
The system I proposed was not massive ... it was a 1% payroll tax below the Social Security threshold and 5% above, which amounts to $70b. But it would have a Health Care Commission that would select the things to be covered on the basis of health benefit per dollar. And it would reduce the stress across the board on Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, hospitals with unfunded emergency room visits, etc., etc.
Energize America
The choice.
is no choice. Sorry folks. But, you can't have a "voluntary" national health care plan. We have to make health care the equivalent of primary education or the interstate system. You don't have a choice, your taxes are going to pay for it, and you are going to be covered.
Now, can we have varying degrees of coverage, where private insurance could still play a role...sure. I recommend against it, but sure. You could have "basic" health care through a universal system with perks through private insurance. But, that will inevitably make the system weaker.
The best system is a single-payer, national health care plan with private hospitals and health care providers.
CountryCrats - my thoughts, my blog.
Well said.
I've tried to rationalize all sorts of other permutations, but they just don't hold water. I like th analogy to public education. It's for the greater good. And the fact that you don't have a kid in school is irrelevant. We're in this together.
Overlays on top of the universal system will be inevitable. Can't stop it and shouldn't even try. But we can stop it from undercutting the common good. I hope.
like JRE said about Iraq...
the choice is between bad and worse, only here it depends on how much private interaction you want. The more private interaction, the worse the health care system. I think the exception to that is hospitals and doctors. Doctors make a lot of money, which keeps the best and brightest joining the ranks, which leads to better care and better treatments.
There are still crappy doctors, but the cream is there as well.
CountryCrats - my thoughts, my blog.
Mine wasn't voluntary.
Its Universal for what it covers, and it preempts anything else for what it covers. And payroll taxes are not voluntary either. Its not an opt-in system, its not an opt-out system, its not a Health Account system, its a universal system.
As to whether multi-payer is intrinsically weaker than single payer, France seems to get good health benefit results for less public expenditure and much, much less private expenditure than the US, and there is certainly not open and shut case that the French system works less well than the British or Canadian systems. The Japanese reached Universal Coverage in the early 60's with a multi-payer system where the different payers are public funds, with contributions from the industry (GHI) national government (GHI), and local government (NHI).
And indeed, to the extent that single payer is the superior solution, one universal coverage system for all citizens (and I expect working permanent residents and their dependents as well) for any collection of treatments gives the single payer system an opportunity to show what it can do.
Energize America
I might have not been talking about what you wrote
but responding to something that came up in my head. Happens : )
I think that John Conyers plan is great because it would fund the states to experiment and see what works best.
CountryCrats - my thoughts, my blog.
