Let's get one thing straight: Medicare For All is socialized HEALTH INSURANCE, not socialized MEDICINE. It's about funding health care, not about providing health care. Under Medicare For All, health care is provided by private doctors and hospitals, not by the government, and you and your doctor, not some government employee, decides what health care you'll get. This is by contrast with socialist medicine as is practice in, say, Norway or Britain, where all doctors are employees of the government and all hospitals are owned by the government. While socialist medicine has proven to be very cost-effective and much more efficient than private provision of health care, it also has proven very inconvenient with long lines for advanced procedures, so Americans would never go for it.
But Medicare For All... look. Every single one of us needs health care. It's not as if people voluntarily go off and peacefully die if their appendix becomes infected, or a doctor tells them "Nuh-uhn, no appendix operation for you!". All that happens if someone isn't insured is that they go to the hospital emergency room and then those of us who are insured pay for it. In short, everybody ends up using health care at some point in time, and given that, it should be mandatory that everybody pay into the health care fund. And the most efficient way to do that is via Medicare For All, which leverages the huge tax-collecting machinery of government to do it in a much more efficient way than private enterprise. 40% of your premium, if you have individual health insurance, goes towards billing you every month and collecting and processing your payments and handling the mandatory insurance fund to make sure they have enough money to handle claims and processing claims and so on and so forth, as vs. less than 2% of Medicare collections. Yes, over 98% of Medicare collections go straight to doctors and hospitals. Medicare is just more efficient.
As for the notion that Medicare For All puts some bureaucrat in charge of your health care... well, Having my health care in the hands of someone who gets paid a bonus to deprive me of care, who in many cases is in some 3rd world country call center and has no formal medical training at all, scares me a whole lot more than having my health care in the hands of a bureaucrat somewhere, even if it were true. But thing is, it isn't true. My grandmother received Medicare and Medicaid during the last 20 years of her life. There was not ONE SINGLE TIME that a government bureaucrat interfered with her health care. Not ONE time. Period. It is a LIE that Medicare For All puts a bureaucrat in charge of your health care. It just isn't true, and the people spreading that lie should be ashamed of themselves -- they should have at least talked to Granny before spewing that sort of nonsense, if they cared in the very least about truth.
-- Badtux the Health Care Penguin
I'm with you B/T, I cannot understand how some of the public seem so fearful of this. And the examples they bring up (though these examples are probably from the socialized medicine) about people waiting too long to see a doctor seem so odd, as if no one in the U.S. had been delayed or even denied health care by their insurer.
ReplyDeleteI have used military facilities for my medical needs on and off throughout my adult life. Now my husband is retired and we have Tricare. Military medicine, as it was in the 80s and 90s, was SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. And it worked. Medicare for all is much better than what we have now, but who is going to oversee those payouts? Medicare overpays doctors right now to the tune of millions every year and no one is doing anything about it. Whatever we can get passed to help those who don't have insurance, but I am for socialized medicine.
ReplyDeleteLLL, my father was a veteran whose nursing home care was courtesy of the VA disability system, and my mother and her current husband are on Tricare. They had no complaints about this "socialist medicine", decisions about their medical care are made by them and their doctor, not by some slumdog in Mumbai being paid $5 a day to answer the phone and deny coverage.
ReplyDeleteRegarding current Medicare, Medicare "overpays" but compensates for that by underpaying for many procedures (i.e., barely paying enough to perform the procedure). There have been audits of Medicare in various areas and the amount of Medicare fraud is maybe 2-3% at worst -- or about 37% less than the cost of providing private individual health insurance. And yes, there are Medicare audits and other checks to make sure Medicare isn't being billed for non-existent people or non-existent procedures, but the fact of the matter is that most doctors are fairly honest and Medicare fraud just isn't as big a problem as you'd think given the hyperbolic headlines you sometimes see about it.
Wok, last time I got sick I called every doctor in my PPO in my area. Either they weren't accepting new patients, or it would be two weeks before they saw me. Long waits for care are *here*, and I am baffled by those who say we shouldn't go to Medicare for All because "there will be long waits for care". And there aren't, already?!
-- Badtux the Health Care Penguin
Wow, 40% of the premiums? I thought I was exaggerating when I said that 30% of every health care dollar spent in the US goes towards administrative costs.
ReplyDeleteHealth insurance companies are still profitable and will fight this tooth and nail by using "socialized medicine" horror stories.
In fairness, administrative costs for group plans are *much* lower than for individual plans because they can issue only one bill for the entire group rather than having to individually bill the members of the group. Somewhere between 5-10% of collections for group plans go to administrative costs, then another 10% for profit for the for-profit insurers. 15-20% for administration and profit still makes them far less efficient than Medicare at collecting and distributing money. One thing government is efficient at is extracting money from our wallets and then shuffling it into other people's wallets, you must admit that much!
ReplyDelete- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Badtux, I have a request for you. This is a topic that I have much interest in, especially after a scare with endophthalmitis (an infection INSIDE the eye) two months ago and having no insurance at age 25. Luckily I managed to find a free clinic in my area that I could get medication from. Anyway, could you possibly do a series of blog posts detailing the pros and cons of some of the major different forms of government subsidized health care around the world? I have heard that Canada's system needs some improvement and that Germany and France's systems are optimal and that Britain's is horrible. I am not sure what the major differences between the systems are. As you know more about this than I do, I am asking you.
ReplyDeleteWell, I've done that comparison before, but I suppose I can do it again.
ReplyDeleteRegarding the "Canadian health system", that's like talking about the "American driver's license" -- there isn't any such thing, it's a province-by-province program, not a federal program. But more on that later.
Thank you. I was aware that the Canadian system is by province, but I do not think that their system would be a good idea for the US. If education funding is any indication, some states heavily fund public education while other states hardly put any money towards it at all. I could see the same thing happening in the US if we adopted a system similar to Canada. Not to mention, there is the possibility of moralistic politicians denying subsidization for STD treatment or birth control. However, even a system similar to Canada's would be superior to what we have at the moment. The state where I am going to college (Minnesota) has a state-funded program for people without insurance called MinnesotaCare. Minnesota is largely a liberal state but its governor, Pawlenty is a hardcore Republican. He feels that he could save the state money by eliminating adults without children (Such as myself) from the MinnesotaCare program. Apparently, being responsible enough to avoid having children that you know you would not be able to care for is less responsible than having them indiscriminately, consequences be damned.
ReplyDeleteOne thing I want to point out is insurance was originally intended to spread the costs of unforeseen 'accidents' among the many involved. Many hands make light payments & we're all in this together, eh? The fact that the U.S. has turned everything into a 'profit' making enterprise, damn the results, is the problem. In paying for health care, at least, maybe America can (it certainly should) spread the cost among the many & drop the profit motive. Somehow, making a profit off the sickness & misfortune of others is not right.
ReplyDeleteAs for waiting lines to see doctors.. the present system of 'see your PCP first & get a recommendation for a specialist' is causing that very thing. As usual, the ridiculous right claims the flaws of it's methods are the others flaws.
If you don't mind, I would like to play the role of devil's advocate. Suppose the Medicare for All model is adopted. How would the system not devolve into what we had under HMOs?
ReplyDeleteThere will come a time where the government will have to cut spending somewhere or maybe we get a small government republican in charge. One of the first places that will be looked at is the health program. Under the guise of reducing costs, the government starts implementing policies that were used in the 90s.
For example, some doctors were given a large bonus if they kept expenses down. This led to some doctors to not recommend treatments that could have save the patient's life because it was expensive. Then there were those stories of the HMO forcing women out of the maternity ward before they really should have been released.