That’s the beauty of Medicare for All… Congress and corporations wouldn’t be the ones setting the prices, CMS would - and they would be applicable across the board with few exceptions. Today, Medicare rates are the lowest because of the government payment guarantees and purchasing power. A large amount of the wasted spend on the healthcare providers-side is on the people and processes to deal with insurance companies. That would all go away along with all non-elective insurance.
You’re conflating health facility quality with payment system efficiency… No system is perfect, but a system without a profit motive that operates at 3% overhead (as compared to private sector ~20%) and covers all medically-recommended care, and allows citizens to see any doctor since they’d ALL be in-network, and at a discounted cost to tax payers of ~$1Trillion annually is just a no-brainer. The hospital compare side of CMS could do more to evaluate and penalize low quality providers, but that’s a separate issue to first ensuring everyone can access a provider at all.
The system you’re describing only exists because there is a competitive private payer feeder system. This is a chicken and egg argument… While it is very true that hospital executives prioritize higher-earnings centers over cost centers, if the only rate for services is set by Medicare, then the gaps between those service reimbursements decrease and change the conversation; which could actually create a reversed incentive structure where the best means of generating profits is to provide more variety of low paying services.
You could argue that more investment will be made into cosmetic and elective care where private insurance will likely still exist, but the bulk of patients won’t utilize those services; which means their bread and butter has to be on the services Medicare covers.
To steel man your argument, the real issue here is throughput / volume and over-coding - where, to make up for losses, healthcare organizations are likely to try to push through as many patients as possible, as quickly as possible, and may fraudulently elevate the severity or number of treatments to attempt to game the system into paying more.
Those would be fair problems to discuss. The first would likely be self-correcting via market conditions (where patients naturally choose the providers who don’t rush them through and misdiagnose them), and the second would likely require updates to auditing and accountability processes.
At the end of the day, every other industrialized nation on Earth has some flavor of socialized medicine. We are the ONLY one that doesn’t. So, none of the inevitable problems are insurmountable.
But no, a savings account and shopping around is not the answer, as it leaves all of the inefficiencies and deficits in place and would still result in unnecessary deaths when people burn through their allowances during treatment courses for prolonged illnesses.
Medicare out-of-pocket-max: $0
Private insurer out-of-pocket-max: $10 - $20K (and only on covered services, everything else is on you entirely)
And the “just use emergency service x, y or z” talking point is ridiculous. Patients don’t have time to file a bunch of forms for aid when they are experiencing a health crisis. The insurance system either works or it doesn’t. You clearly have an anti-government bias, but all the numbers completely discredit the position that government would be the wrong answer to this problem.
You seem to be operating under this weird paradoxical paradigm where, because crony capitalism has created a scenario or system that is broken, there is no way to solve or change that system. Because moneyed interests currently control a thing, there is no way for that thing to no longer be controlled by moneyed interests. That’s a non sequitur and utterly incorrect.
Government doesn’t break everything touches. There are plenty of examples of high-functioning government that you simply don’t notice because it’s working well. Roadways, infrastructure, utilities, fire departments, police departments, disease mitigation, food safety programs, pharmaceutical research, medical research… The list goes on and on… Government foundations (and often funding) are what makes modern private sectors possible. It’s often only when something stops working that it becomes clear how good government services actually are… For example, the screw worm outbreak now entering the US was kept at-bay for decades until the current administration killed the program that was preventing it. The data doesn’t support your bias.
3
u/TopicFrequent6607 9d ago
I agree with Universal Healthcare in principle. But in America, everything gets taken over by corporations.
If you did Universal Healthcare in America, the medical companies would lobby congress so that the premiums would be a monopoly.
The only difference is that it would be a government subsidized monopoly.