Well, the devil is in the details.
Related posts:
- Medicare and medical errors: A taste of single-payer
- Single payer DOA in Connecticut
- Single-payer bias
- Single-payer already exists in the US
- Americans won’t buy single-payer
- A single-payer compromise?
- Single-payer is inevitable
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Yes, the devil is in this single detail that always gets swept under the rug on this discussion. We pay TWICE as much per capita for healthcare as other countries do.
Take any country’s universal health budget. Now double it.
That’s the money we would have to work with per capita. Think that would smooth out some, if not all of the differences? If not, why not?
The amount of money in the US healthcare system is enormous. It is not hard to imagine the US with a reasonable universal coverage system since we would spend twice as much as other countries.
Also … please, again show me data that our FFS private insurance system is BETTER than anyone else’s on any global health measure. I keep waiting for that.
The original blog makes a very good point. Even if you believe that we should have a single payor system, how do you get from here to there?
I can deal with Medicare bearocracy, but at my current expenses I can’t provide an acceptable quality of care with medicare payment levels.
I will grant that current erroneous interpretations of the constitution effectively make possible legislation of a single-payor system. How are you going to simultaneously legislate a differing set of expectations in me and my patients about what is an acceptable quality of care? How are you going to simultaneously legislate away half of my expenses?
We pay TWICE as much per capita for healthcare as other countries do.
How about meaningful statistics. Correct the per-capita costs for cost of living – by this analysis, Cuba spends 30 or more times, per capita, what the US spends.
How about accounting for “cultural” differences in care? How does end-of-life care compare in these other countries? Are they spending 90% of their healthcare dollar on the terminal hospitalization? Or are they deciding much earlier that it is too costly and too much effort to try to rescue these patients? Perhaps, if you are the 1-in-100 for whom such efforts might succeed and result in a meaningful recovery, you would not want to see those choices eliminated?
Comparing uncorrected, unadjusted statistics abuot “healthcare” without determining exactly what that “healthcare” is is just politicking.
How about elimiating the cosemtic dollar that is spent on non-cosmetic procedures? Is the reconstructive breast surgery dollar, for example, included ion your analysis? How many government run healthcare systems provide post-recovery breast reconstruction?
What about wound care? How many govt run healthcare systems would provide comprehensive wound care rather than just performing the amputation? What is the amputation rate in diabetics in these systems compared to the US? Amputation is cheaper (in healthcare dollars).
These are examples of the unmeasured quality of healthcare in this country – choice.
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