yossarian wrote:
Slide 23 is wrong. We know Europe-style care is vastly cheaper (2-3 times cheaper, per person, including even those not paying now) for comparable results.
Slide 23 had nothing to do with this though. It simply states the obvious fact that employed people with coverage pay for the coverage they get. Even with the government as a payer, they get their money via taxes and thus, those who are employed (and presumably also covered by the government plan) are the ones who pay. Unless you're saying that unemployed people pay for health care under any system, this slide is 100% accurate.
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Slide 34, however, is right. The government right now pays less for exactly equal treatments, within the US. And we know any large group which is interested can negotiate better deals with drug companies.
Missing the point. That slide isn't talking about the cost of the health care itself (ie: how much the doctor charges, or the cost for the equipment, tests, etc), but rather how much the insurer will charge the consumer for said coverage. The government can't magically pay less for an examination than a private insurer, but it can charge it's customer less for covering that examination. This is because the private insurer has to make a profit (or at least break even), while the government can run at a loss and make up the difference in tax revenue of some kind.
That's what this slide was talking about. The government could provide 100 dollars of coverage to the end consumer, but only charge them 80 bucks for it. No one else can do this.
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Slide 43 forgets what was said on slide 34, that the government plan is actually *cheaper* and thus you *can* pay less, not more. Virtually every other developed nation *does* pay less.
Again. They don't discuss the effect a given reform choice might have on overall health care costs over time. You're insisting on introducing speculative changes. One of the things I liked about this is that the author specifically did *not* speculate, but rather compared apples to apples. In the US, a doctor is going to charge X dollars for a visit. How much exactly X is isn't the issue, but rather how X is paid.
Your statements assume much more significant changes than anyone is seriously proposing and assumes those changes will actually change the cost of X. There's certainly valid argument to be had there, but it's completely outside the scope of what this presentation is about.
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And none of the slides cover the moral desire to help prevent the great suffering and death of the uninsured.
Yes. Because it wasn't about that.