It ought to reduce the need for huge payouts in medical malpractice too. There’d still be lawsuits, but the stakes wouldn’t be as high since the patient wouldn’t need to secure enough money to pay for long-term care anymore.

Think of it this way: if you had a business that sold one product to one company and that company all of a sudden said “we’re not paying this,” you’d either lower your prices or you’d go out of business. If the new negotiated price for your product was too low for you to stay in business, sure, that’d be a problem.…

I don’t understand why people always assume that reduced drug prices in the US won’t result in increased prices elsewhere.

Instead of 8 types of painkillers, you’d be back down to 3, and only people needing them would get them.

it does eliminate the waste in redundant social systems since EVERYONE gets the same thing, and also because everyone gets the same thing and capped the same way,

Your argument is, if the government use the military to declare they won’t pay a bill, the cost goes down? By that argument, building roads and water treatment is free. That fixes education too, we won’t pay to build new schools or pay the teachers. Let’s use the military to tell Lockheed Martin we won’t pay for new…

The people taking the hit would be the billing specialists, because we’d need a lot fewer of them to handle billing under a single payer system. This is where a huge amount of our healthcare spending goes - there are many hospitals with billing departments that have more employees than the hospital has beds for…

Even if that’s true, it doesn’t mean that same subset would be OK with their paychecks taking a substantial hit from lower reimbursement rates, which is what the current best practice single payer plan assumes in its pricing.

lol You think employers would take one breath before canceling their healthcare plans if it meant being able to shift all of the costs onto the government? It would be in their interest to do so.

they can stop spending so much fucking money on war toys, trump trips, hooker payoffs, etc

I think some of that squeeze has to do with the fact that since, as the article points out, 83% of the national market is owned by 4 FOR PROFIT insurance companies, which have a vested interested in eliminated costs and increasing profits. vs. (and we have to make some assumptions here), costs would be negotiated to…

You are correct. I cited the wrong thing. My apologies. I was reading too quickly and it was 80-85% of people covered by employer insurance are happy with it.

Except those same hospitals will be able to eliminate huge departments dedicated to navigating overly complicated billings. They’ll save money, at least in the short term, on employees.

Health care salaries are one thing that everybody involved with coverage reform tip toes around, and I’ve been waiting for the conversation to shift to that to see what happens. Average physician, nurse, pharmacist and many other health care professionals in the US have far higher incomes than counterparts in the UK,…

I don’t’ really care who comes up with the estimate. I care what the assumptions in the estimate are.

$800 per month I currently spend on health insurance,

Either those companies will be paying their employees higher salaries (because they’ll need to to keep them from leaving), or they’re going to be paying more in the raised taxes that would likely pay for this plan anyways.

A drug company, for example, has the choice to come to an agreement with NICE or not sell in England and Wales and thus miss out on an important market. Having worked for a drug company that was in that position, I can assure you, that they feel the leverage the NHS has.

The ACA is sliding away because healthy people keep leaving it, because it was designed to make them do that, i.e., designed to fail. I’m actually shocked it’s still around, although it certainly won’t be for much longer. The ACA-using population is, indeed, very sick and diseased. So the whole point here is that…

Can we pose that same question to large corporations?