The highlights:
Cost per Hospital Day
US: median, $4,287
Next closest: Australia, $1,472
Health Spending a Percent of GDP
US: 17.6%
Next closest: France, 11.6%
It’s the cost of care. IMO, this needs to be tackled through pricing transparency. Care providers need to tell you what it is going to cost up front, not a month later when the bill arrives. If we’re not doing single payer, then consumers have to be able to differentiate on price and quality.
No worries. Obamacare fixed this already.
For all the hate given to Obamacare, please show me one substantial overhaul that’s ever been attempted by the GOP.
It beats the hell out of “Lets do nothing and hope it goes away.”
Opposing Obamacare does not mean that someone has to side with the GOP. In my opinion, both parties fail to perform in many areas.
Gotta say though, after dealing with some insurance providers, I’d rather deal with the IRS than with BCBS.
^It’s hard to imagine being worse than the IRS.
With the IRS I have a reasonable explanation of what I will owe. I have good health care coverage and a pretty high net worth. If I got cancer, assuming I lived, I am not at all confident I would not be bankrupt at the end of it. You cannot know the cost, other than that it will be a lot. Scary.
^ One reason why I’m ok living in my high tax socialist paradise.
What Ohai said. But it’s not like Republicans haven’t attempted overhauls. Remember during early in Bush’s second term, he promoted HSAs and price transparency? Unfortunately, price transparency is something that doctors and insurers fight against and it never really got off the ground. Of course, it didn’t help that Obama partnered with the AMA (i.e. health care price fixers) when pushing Obamacare. Now everyone knows even less about what’s going on.
Ok, fine, but give me an alternative. I’m not saying the current system is the best. But my hope out of it would be that at the very least it may serve as a catalyst for future improvements.
For that reason (and because I love the outdoors), I’m really considering switching to Canadian citizenship before I’m 40.
We could start by letting plans compete across state lines.
The problem is that when health insurance becomes a for-profit operation, business strategy evolves into refining the question: “How can we collect the highest premiums possible, and then pay as little as possible when called upon to provide the service we promise.” Over time, this evolves into “promise great coverage, and add little tricks into the fine print that allow us to drop you or deny service for trivial reasons.”
It’s different from the market forces that work on typical goods, because you can generally sample them and get a feel for what different prices deliver and the quality that different prices purchase, and make your decision.
The perfect world for such a company is to advertise amazing coverage, charge an arm and a leg by scaring people into the idea that if they don’t pay it, they risk being put in the poorhouse by having a hangnail, and then dropping them as ineligible the moment that there’s a hint of something expensive diagnosed. If you were the CEO of said company, that’s what you would want to do, though you would also want to spend a lot on advertising to cover it up.
This is why insurance can cost so much, and yet you have no idea how much you are going to have to pay if you are diagnosed with something that takes more than an aspirin and bed-rest to treat.
The one-payer guys say that if you have a single payer system, you can remove the profit motive out insurance and reduce costs that way.
Those against the one-payer system suggest that increased competition will pose a limit to how high premiums can go. But given that there is almost no transparency in how prices work, the fact is that all we can really know is how much the monthly premiums are likely to be, we really don’t know what benefits we are getting for those premiums because we don’t have any idea of what charges are going to be disallowed. As a result, the premiums might be lower with competition, but there’s no telling whether those premia are actually protecting you in any way from anything serious. And those who want less and less law and regulation and more and more markets get even less guarantees that anything serious will actually be covered.
FTFY;)
I mean, you reduce the profit motive, but when there is only so much money to be spent you wind up with rationing whether its intended or not. Where I lived in Canada, it was a challenge to get preventative stuff done unless you scheduled it months in advance because there was no availability. Most of the primary care docs I tried didn’t accept new patients. I didn’t find one until my stepmom’s doctor agreed to take me. Even though I’m paying ~$1200 a year for my portion of health insurance, I’m much happier with it here because I can actually get what I need, when I need it. People in my office who came from the UK are also much happier with the US system. There is a huge difference between having the health care system and actually having access to care.
Now I’m not saying the US system is perfect, far from it, but I don’t think true single payer is the right solution.
The confusion between “insurance” and “health care” in this thread highlight the crux of the problem.
Typical democrat reply when clearly things are failing. “oops yea we failed miserably, but what did you do?” choosing between doing nothing and making things worse, I’ll take doing nothing.
Obama dictated what was “acceptable” as a HC plan, eliminating many plans Americans were fine with, forcing people to lose coverage, pay up, or get fined by the IRS.
He pushed out implementing his plan with dozens of “executive actions” on the fly that have delayed the biggest harm and impact to employers before midterm elections while trying to keep the benefits. good job POTUS, or should we start calling him Emperor? latter seems more fitting
“new” signups stats are a bunch of Bull considering the normal churn we get at signups every year.
HC “savings” are countered by the fees to come for employers (yay socialism), and far more restrictions for HC with “narrow networks”. (yay for your doc DK’ing your coverage, and having to travel far away for care from a cheapo hospital/doc willing to take your insurance)
At the end of the day, the public has spoken and awarded the democrats with the heaviest losses in modern day Congress. good job public, finally did something right for once.
I attended a tax prep training session last Tuesday to get certified for some volunteer tax prep I do.
2.5/4 hours were spent on Obamacare. Not even the instructors understood the filing process, the various rules, exemptions, stipends, repayment of overpaid stipends, etc.
And my personal favorite, the tax forms for insurance and IRS books were still marked DRAFT as of 1/13/2015.
The IRS is screwed this year, but everyone knows poor people don’t get audited.
Edit: nevermind, I realize now your were talking about the 2010, not the 2012, election. Itera is correct, but the negative spread in most years is interesting.
False, losses were much larger in 2010 (Obama), 2006 (Bush II), 1994 (Clinton), 1984 (Reagan) and 1974 (Ford/Nixon). 2012 losses were actually pretty mild.
It is very interesting that the majority of presidents lose seats in the House of Reps in mid-terms; I suppose it shows the system of checks and balances in action. Or, maybe just seesawing back from the boost from election years.
How to fix healthcare in US, in n easy steps (some repeated from above):
Make the charge master public. No other business hides their prices. Even when they give discounts to big customers and so on, a list price is always available.
Don’t use insurance for routine health care (I think that’s what itera implied.) Separate out insurance used for major stuff from primary care. See http://time.com/3643841/medicine-gets-personal/
Uniform rules for insurance companies, across the country.
Some form of the following Obamacare provisions:
4a. mandatory coverage for pre-existing conditions
4b. adults must carry health insurance (like auto insurance)
Allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices.
Spend less government (Medicare/Medicaid) money on last 6 months of a dying 90-year-old. Sorry that sounds heartless but there should be a cap (e.g. $500K).
Make Medicare like Social Security - you get what you put in (plus interest / compounding). Or like Bush did, let tax-free HSAs augment Medicare. This will lessen some of the heartbreak from #6 if that 90-year-old managed to set some money aside for health care.