To Want or Not Want Government Care?

[freeloader]

The United States has the most expensive healthcare system in the world.  Per capita, we pay better than 50% more per citizen than any other country.  In 2020, we spent, on average nearly $12,000 per person.  Only 1 other country spend more than $7,000 per person.  The average for industrial/post-industrial countries is around $5,700 per person, or less than half what we spend.

https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/char...untries-2/

So, why do we spend so much on healthcare?  Respectfully, it has nothing to do with military spending; the fact that we have a large military has ZERO relationship to our nation's ability to provide high-quality, affordable healthcare.

Lets start with providers: the average physician in the United States make more than $315,000 per year.  Germany pays its physicians, on average $183,000 per year; the United Kingdom $138,000 per year.  Just as an aside: nurses in the US make, on average, more per year than doctors in all but about a half-dozen countries.

https://www.beckersasc.com/benchmarking/...dings.html

And the insurance companies?  In the 2nd Quarter of 2020, Anthem reported $2.3 billion worth of income.  This is one insurance company and one quarter.  Anthem covers around 40 million Americans with its policies.  

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/05/healt...ofits.html



We have an expensive, inefficient healthcare system in the United States because there are many people who like it that way.  There are the physicians, nurses, healthcare executives, insurance companies, trial attorneys (suing a poor doctor isn't nearly as fun or profitable as suing a rich one!), and many others who have a real, vested interest in healthcare being as expensive as possible.  

There are the people who want to keep the government out of their lives--people who would much rather they and their employer pay, so 25% or their wages, for health insurance rather than paying nothing for insurance and having their taxes go up, say 10%.  They are willing to pay more for their "freedom."  

There are old people.  The United States already has a quasi-socialized medical system.  Its called Medicare.  It provides world-class coverage at very low cost to old people.  Most countries with real socialized medicine prioritize young, working people.  Other people are often given pain pills and allowed to die.  In the United States we allow productive, working 20- and 30-somethings to die but will spend millions of dollars providing surgeries and medicine to people in their 80s and 90s.  I remember the words of the lieutenant governor of Texas who said old people would willingly sacrifice themselves so that the state and economy would not be destroyed by Covid restrictions.  If only that were true.  Decades of voting and legislation show that is not at all true.

The reality is that we CAN have socialized medicine/Medicare for all, but we can't just expand Medicare without dramatic changes to the system.  Your family physician can't make $200,000 per year.  Your surgeon can't make $800,000 per year.  Your nurses can't make $100,000 per year.  The hospital can't make millions of dollars, despite its non-profit status.  The trial attorneys in your town can't put up hundreds of billboards on every street corner and on the back of every bus advertising how many millions/billions they have "recovered" for their clients.  And perhaps most controversially, we can't continue spending billions of dollars to prolong the lives of the oldest Americans who contribute very little to the economy.  And yes, that does mean we will have a "public" and a "private" system; the private system will focus on providing treatments of questionable necessity to old people.