Even in “socialist” countries like Sweden and Denmark, people pay 14 to 15 percent of healthcare out of pocket. Canada doesn’t cover prescription drugs, with private insurance picking up 13 percent of the country’s health bills.
Medicare for All would cost the federal government $32.6 trillion over its first 10 years, an increase of $6.65 trillion over current spending over a decade.
To make this plan work, there would have to be draconian cuts to providers and unrealistic savings on administrative and prescription drug costs. It would require high tax increases to be financed. One possible plan starts with an 8.4 percent hike in payroll taxes, sharply higher income tax rates and more.
Sally Pipes, writing in Investor Business Daily on Aug. 8, 2018, says “to control costs, the government would inevitably ration care. Patients would face long wait times, just as they do in the single-payers systems of Canada and the United Kingdom.”
About 10 percent of Britons pay for private insurance on top of their government-sponsored coverage in older to get around these waits.
Bureaucrats could declare some treatments off-limits-perhaps because of their price, or perhaps because they thought a person was too sick or too old to benefit. Pipes writes that currently, the United Kingdom denies certain surgeries to smokers and obese people.
The U.S. is famous for over-spending on health care, according to Yoni Blumberg writing @YoniBlum on March 22, 2018.
Our nation spent 17.8 percent of its GDP on healthcare in 2016. Meanwhile, the average spending of 11 high-income countries assessed in a new report Canada, Germany, Australia, the U.K., Japan, Sweden, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Denmark, and the U.S., published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, was only 11.5 percent.
We spent nearly double what the others spent.
According to researchers at the Harvard Chan School, what sets the U.S. apart may be inflated prices across the board.
“In the U.S., the report points out, drugs are more expensive, doctors get paid more, hospital services and diagnostic tests cost more, and a lot more money goes to planning, regulating and managing medical services at the administrative level.”
The report challenges popular beliefs about why healthcare spending is so high.
Suggested high utilization rates are not so and various procedures such as knee and hip replacements and different types of heart surgeries are not much different than other countries. We actually seem to go to the doctor less often and spend fewer days in the hospital after being admitted.
The real difference between the American healthcare system and systems abroad is pricing. Specialists, nurses, and primary care doctors all earn significantly more in the U.S. compared to other countries.
General physicians in America make an average of $218,173 dollars in 2016 which was double the generalists in the other countries, where pay ranged from $86,607 in Sweden to $154,126 in Germany.
That might be a problem for some here with several children in private school and tuition being what it is. Administrative costs in the U.S. are about 8 percent of national health expenditures while they are one to three percent elsewhere.
As for the drug market, the U.S. spent $1,443 per capita on pharmaceuticals. The average pharmaceutical spending of all 11 countries came to $749 per capita with Switzerland following the U.S. at $939. The mean payment for an MRI in the U.s. was $1,145 compared to $350 in Australia and $461 in the Netherlands.
The report goes on to say, “Higher spending in some areas could make sense.” Investing in pharmaceuticals, for instance, is believed to lead to innovation. Indeed in 2016, “the U.S. accounted for 57 percent of total global production of new chemical entities.”
Investors Business Daily (Oct. 22, 2018) had an article saying “Obamacare was designed to fail so Democrats could push ‘single payer.’ This was called conspiracy mongering. But guess what,” Obamacare is failing and Democrats are now pushing Medicare for All “as the solution.”
Bills now in the House and Senate would outlaw private health insurance including all employer-provided plans, individually purchased insurance, and every single union plan. There would be no copays or deductibles on anything from doctor visits, surgery and drugs to long-term care, dental and vision. Only cosmetic surgery would not be covered. No other country in the world does that.
Our health care system could use some adjustments but overall, it is, in my opinion very good.
More people need to be given coverage, generic drugs should be more available when the patents on the original drug expire, and other changes to make lower price products from reliable manufacturers available.
Bertram Drachtman
Great Neck
