Universal Health Care: Can We Afford Anything Less?

[marmar]

from Dollars & Sense:



Universal Health Care: Can We Afford Anything Less?
Why only a single-payer system can solve America’s health-care mess.

By Gerald Friedman


America’s broken health-care system suffers from what appear to be two separate problems. From the right, a chorus warns of the dangers of rising costs; we on the left focus on the growing number of people going without health care because they lack adequate insurance. This division of labor allows the right to dismiss attempts to extend coverage while crying crocodile tears for the 40 million uninsured. But the division between the problem of cost and the problem of coverage is misguided. It is founded on the assumption, common among neoclassical economists, that the current market system is efficient. Instead, however, the current system is inherently inefficient; it is the very source of the rising cost pressures. In fact, the only way we can control health-care costs and avoid fiscal and economic catastrophe is to establish a single-payer system with universal coverage.

The rising cost of health care threatens the U.S. economy. For decades, the cost of health insurance has been rising at over twice the general rate of inflation; the share of American income going to pay for health care has more than doubled since 1970 from 7% to 17%. By driving up costs for employees, retirees, the needy, the young, and the old, rising health-care costs have become a major problem for governments at every level. Health costs are squeezing public spending needed for education and infrastructure. Rising costs threaten all Americans by squeezing the income available for other activities. Indeed, if current trends continued, the entire economy would be absorbed by health care by the 2050s.

Conservatives argue that providing universal coverage would bring this fiscal Armageddon on even sooner by increasing the number of people receiving care. Following this logic, their policy has been to restrict access to health care by raising insurance deductibles, copayments, and cost sharing and by reducing access to insurance. Even before the Great Recession, growing numbers of American adults were uninsured or underinsured. Between 2003 and 2007, the share of non-elderly adults without adequate health insurance rose from 35% to 42%, reaching 75 million. This number has grown substantially since then, with the recession reducing employment and with the continued decline in employer-provided health insurance. Content to believe that our current health-care system is efficient, conservatives assume that costs would have risen more had these millions not lost access, and likewise believe that extending health-insurance coverage to tens of millions using a plan like the Affordable Care Act would drive up costs even further. Attacks on employee health insurance and on Medicare and Medicaid come from this same logic—the idea that the only way to control health-care costs is to reduce the number of people with access to health care. If we do not find a way to control costs by increasing access, there will be more proposals like that of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) and the Republicans in the House of Representatives to slash Medicaid and abolish Medicare.

The Problem of Cost in a Private, For-Profit Health Insurance System

If health insurance were like other commodities, like shoes or bow ties, then reducing access might lower costs by reducing demands on suppliers for time and materials. But health care is different because so much of the cost of providing it is in the administration of the payment system rather than in the actual work of doctors, nurses, and other providers, and because coordination and cooperation among different providers is essential for effective and efficient health care. It is not cost pressures on providers that are driving up health-care costs; instead, costs are rising because of what economists call transaction costs, the rising cost of administering and coordinating a system that is designed to reduce access. .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2011/0711friedman.html

[kestrel91316]

1. NO.

[Demeter]

2. No and Hell No!

If Libby Montana can get Medicare for all, including newborns, then so can the rest of us.

Ask Senator Baucus.

[seafan]

5. Senator Baucus dislikes questions, don'tcha know.

As Max Baucus barters away our Medicare, he slipped LibbyCare into the health care bill last year



Universal Health Care: Can We Afford Anything Less?

It's July, 2011; we still demand an answer to this question.


And to Mr. Baucus (D(?)-Montana) and his assorted GOP cohorts, greedheads and run-for-the-hills cowards, we are NOT going away.

[eridani]

6. +1000 n/t

[Uncle Joe]

3. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, marmar.

[ProfessionalLeftist]

4. NO. We can't. For a detailed accounting of why we didn't finally end up with that...

...read 'Deadly Spin' by insurance industry whistleblower Wendell Potter. It's a real eye-opener.

[nxylas]

7. K&R

Would it be cynical to suggest that Obama's famous campaign slogan was actually his answer to the question posed in the thread/article title?