What happens when, say, 10 years from now, government has enacted Medicare for all, many private insurance companies have had to close their doors and access to private insurance is no longer an option, or at least an affordable option.
Now, the government has you in its clutches and you have nowhere to go. Government realizes that the current income will not support the system, so now they have to start raising taxes every year to pay for it.
Oh, and that promise that, once you're on MFA that there will be no more copays, no more prescription costs and medical treatment will be free, that will go away once they realize the cost is going to be MUCH higher than they anticipated, and people are going to the doctor for every little ache and pain.
It wont be long before they start saying "well, looks like we will need to start charging a copay after all, aaaaaaand.....were going to need you to chip in about 30% of the cost of your prescriptions.....aaaaaaaand.....were going to have to raise your taxes by another $500 next year to help cover costs..."
And now....you have nowhere to go, because all your old insurance companies are gone.
I've heard people say "it will be cheaper because we won't have to pay some ceo 15 million a year".....really?? You think government run health care wont have its share of people siphoning from the system? Instead of a ceo being paid 15 million a year, you'll have politicians raiding the fund for 15 million per year.
Government has never been the bastion of efficiency. Government is wasteful and spendy, and there is never a pool of money yet that the government cant leave alone. They see money setting somewhere, they have to spend it. The same will happen with this Medicare for all taxation money.
We know for sure a government administered health care system will have much less overhead, because Medicare and VA hospitals already do have less then a forth of the over head cost of private health insurance companies.
You simply are easily proven wrong by the low administration costs of Medicare since its beginning in 1965.
It is not just that Medicare has much lower administration costs, but that private health insurance companies deliberately encourage providers to inflate their charges, because that increases the number of customers who can no longer afford health care without having insurance.
Collective bargaining over health care costs can easily reduce them by more than half.
What you have to remember is that what caused the current private health care insurance system was for employers to illegally be granted an income tax exemption for employee benefits. All benefits should always have been taxed, and the government should not have encouraged the wealthy to be able to get employer benefits tax exemptions, because the poor do not get them, and that caused the poor to subsidize the wealthy.
How many people are enrolled in medicare and the v.a.? About 55 million in medicare and about 9 million a year use the v.a. services?
Let's say medicare for all becomes the only affordable option, and you have over 280 million people enrolled in it, you'll see that overhead rise very quickly.
The only reason Medicare and Medicaid survive is because of private pay and private insurance.
Providers often have to accept underpayment for government patients. They recoup those losses on private pay and private insurance by raising rates on everybody. That's why when a medical facility closes down, it's usually in poorer areas where most of the clientele are on government programs. There is no place to recoup the lost money.
So then Democrats get in charge and it's Medicare for all. Okay.....fine.....but where are facilities supposed to recoup their losses from now?
The truth is they can't. So they either close down, or government has to start paying
their fair share for all of their government patients which would then be everybody in the country. It would be totally unaffordable.
but if health care was a 'widget' being sold, the increase in patients, (sales) would reduce the price of the widget's costs and then reduce the price at retail...
if more medical procedures are done... lets say a hospital does 1000 MRI's a year and then let's say1000 more people a year get an MRI at a hospital than previous years because more people have health care coverage with a universal plan for all... the cost of that MRI per person, should be reduced...
because the MRI machine cost them X amt of money, of which they are paying off the loan for.... with doubling the MRI's done in a year.... they can lower the price per person and still pay off the fixed cost of the loan each year and still make their profit... same with all other specialty medical machines, like ones for mammograms, xrays, CT Scans, etc etc etc,.... and buying supplies...like gauze, aspirin, sutures, scissors, scalpels, bed sheets etc etc etc.... all cheaper because they can get a bulk discount from manufacturers... the larger the order, the cheaper the price....
so, if health care operates like any other retail widget, the increase in patients, (buying customers) that most are fearing of hurting the system, would be like increasing the number of units sold at retail, which would bring their prorated overhead and supply costs, and medical equipment costs down....?
it seems like it could work in that manner... if it were like retail....
but that would leave us with needing more workers in the medical field... and for a short time that could be a problem, but we could address this near immediately by pushing college kids in to the medical field.... jobs jobs jobs....
PLEASE don't get me wrong on this, I am not supporting medicare for all... I was just thinking out loud on it....
