Koch Brothers Prove Single Payer Would Save Trillions

How embarrassing. The Koch brothers sought to prove how ridiculously unaffordable Single Payer with Universal Coverage would be. Instead, they found out it would save trillions of dollars. 

Of course, they tried to deemphasize the results by pounding their fists on the table and saying look this would cost 32.6 trillion-dollars over 10 years and we can't afford that.  Unfortunately for them, they funded the Conservative George Mason University to conduct the study and in order for the study to be academically sound they were forced to include that the 32.6 trillion dollar cost would be more than 2 trillion dollars more than we will spend via the existing health care system over the same ten year period. 

Better yet, the plan George Mason University studied, had healthcare free to the patient at the point of service.  There would be no deductibles or co-pays or any other out of pocket costs to the patient whatsoever. Employers wouldn't have to pay for employee health care plans anymore and everyone would be covered including the roughly 11% population that doesn't currently have health care coverage now. In short, everybody comes out a winner except health insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies. 

There you have it, the Koch Brothers, Conservative George Mason University, and the CBO all agree the least expensive health care system would be a Single Payer with Universal Coverage. Conservatives quit advocating for a system that requires the government, taxpayers, and business to give insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies an ongoing and ever-increasing amount of "free stuff" to keep their failed business model afloat. 

Source

Ahhhhhh, . . . Paradise at last ! ! !

Except, . . . 

. . . from Mark's source:

"Blahous’ report also shows that total U.S. health care spending would fall by about $2.05 trillion during that time period, even as all Americans would finally have insurance, because the plan would reduce payments to doctors and hospitals to Medicare rates (which are lower than what private insurance pays) while saving on prescription drug costs and administrative expenses."

"Blahous isn’t totally clueless about this. He devotes a good part of his paper to arguing that paying every doctor at Medicare reimbursement rates is probably not realistic (other, more centrist think tanks have argued the same), meaning single payer won’t save as much money as Sanders hopes. He produces a separate estimate showing that, without cuts to providers, single payer would increase national health spending by more than $3.2 trillion, as Americans would go to the doctor a lot more. But that estimate isn’t especially realistic either, since it’s fairly unlikely that Congress would pass anything remotely resembling a single-payer bill without any payment reductions."

[boldface added - DD] 

So essentially the cited study says if medical care providers are paid less, the cost of medical care will decrease.

DUH !

i can only hope the government would install payment reductions.     I have the obscene perspective that a hospital should not be able to charge you $500 For salt water

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/27/health/exploring-salines-secret-costs.html

if you don’t think there is massive price gouging occurring in our status quo system then you are not paying attention.

The key phrasing is "won't save as much as he hopes." In other words, we don't have to go to either extreme to make it work. Make some cuts to providers but not reduce all of them down to Medicare reimbursement rates.  Furthermore, you could introduce small co-pays such as $10 for a GP visit and $100 for a non-emergency ER visit. Don Diego seems to conclude it is ok to keep giving insurance companies free stuff to prop up their failed business model if the savings are only 1 trillion instead of 2. 

Or you can go to a salaried model for doctor compensation instead of allowing them to charge ala-carte for every simple thing they do.   This would also remove billions of dollars in fraud that occurs from doctors ordering unnecessary tests to pad their income.  

 Being paid by the number of "patients treated" vs "procedures performed" is  generally how doctors are paid in the rest of the world - the downside is they only have one ferrari instead of two.

The country's current example of single payer is the VA & that is a disaster

Like I said in the other thread, my brother in law loves the VA.