| Submit your comments on this article |
| Economy |
| No, Single-Payer Reforms Won't Curb Hospital Costs |
| 2018-08-01 |
| [National Review] Reforms that eliminate barriers to hospital competition are a much smarter option. Charles Blahous of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University has just demonstrated the perils of making generous assumptions for the sake of proving a narrow point. In an attempt to quantify the rough fiscal impact associated with having the federal government take up all health-care costs currently borne by private insurers, employers, and individuals, Blahous accepted the assumption made by Senator Bernie Sanders and other single-payer proponents that the reform could save billions by purchasing services from hospitals at Medicare rates. Although Blahous’s study estimated that Sanders’s "Medicare for All" proposal would impose a fiscal burden of $32 trillion (yes, trillion) over ten years and a likely annual tax increase of $26,000 per American household, single-payer advocates have been thrilled by its publication, seizing on its comparison between the estimated cost and expected private health-insurance spending over that ten-year period to argue that it would actually save Americans $2 trillion. This "finding" is merely the result of a preposterous assumption: that because Medicare currently pays 40 percent less than private insurers for hospital services, the cost of delivering hospital services to the privately insured could be proportionately reduced simply by having the government rather than insurers pay hospitals for them. |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #1 Two major issues drive the cost of health care in the US. First are illegals and homeless using emergency rooms as primary care physicians. Because those costs are unrecoverable, the hospital smears them across the cost of other services. Second, hospitals are expensive with their staff of specialists and hospital beds. If a hospital is only 50% occupied, those occupied rooms must bear the cost of the unoccupied beds with their associated staff working at reduced efficiency. Then you have the specialist who only sees three patients a day. His costs are added to the costs of more frequently used specialists. The entire model of a hospital delivering health care is wrong. These large vertically integrated health care organizations have huge costs of under utilization that are smeared across the rest of the hospital. A completely different subject is Big Pharma. Possibly the most corrupt, unethical bunch of scum sucking vermin on the planet, even worse than anyone in Congress or the Senate. Their price gouging and accounting games are used to charge huge sums of money for medications. Of course you have the 80-20 rule in which 80% of the health care resources are consumed by 20% of the people...usually illegals who run their kids to the emergency room for the sniffles and soccer moms who think their kid has every ailment and allergy mentioned on the news. |
| Posted by: Sock Puppet of Doom 2018-08-01 13:58 |