Why America Does Not have Medicare For All

[MsGuy]

Here's an interesting explanation of the reasons the USA does not (& will not in the foreseeable future have) Medicare for all citizens.

Do you think, as President Obama has suggested, that a "Medicare for all" system would work in the US?

 

Peter Schachte, Expatriate American

Answered Oct 12

 

 

 

Unfortunately no, Medicare for all will not work in the US.

The reason is very simple, but it’s not what you might think.

First, the problem is not that the US can’t afford it. Much poorer countries than the US have universal healthcare. If you look at List of countries with universal health care, you’ll see that, from Albania to Zambia, most of the world’s countries have universal healthcare. Among developed countries, the US is alone in not providing it.

And it’s not because government run health systems are less efficient. In fact, the US healthcare system is the most expensive in the world, and US health spending is rising much faster than almost anywhere else.

The US’s healthcare system is surprisingly inefficient compared to countries with government run systems.

And by the way, the inefficiency of US healthcare is more on the side of private insurance than medicare (Is Medicare Cost Effective?).

It’s also not because US healthcare is so much better than other countries’. The best US healthcare is definitely top notch, but many Americans don’t receive great quality of care. For one thing, Medical error is the third leading cause of death in the US. And the US underperforms in other measures of healthcare quality, too.

Of course, these are complex matters and affected by much more than the quality of healthcare, but the point is that the US healthcare system is an outlier among developed countries in per capita health spending and the rate health spending is rising, and yet it still delivers poor health outcomes. Could this be in part because one in 8 Americans does not have health insurance, and many more have low quality insurance?

But perhaps Americans are happy with their healthcare system as it is? No, it’s not that, either.

But perhaps the US has some insurmountable problems that mean that US health spending must always be higher than other countries, and medicare for all would be unable to help? No, it’s not that. 6 Reasons Healthcare Is So Expensive in the U.S. includes administrative overhead as the primary reason. In particular, the administrative costs in hospitals and doctor’s offices; for example, “the 1,300 billing clerks at Duke University Hospital, which has only 900 beds”. That overhead is because of the complexity and multiplicity of insurance policies and companies. A single payer healthcare system would remove the bulk of those administrative costs (and make medicare itself much more efficient).

A second problem is drug costs.

A single payer like medicare for all would have the economic clout to greatly reduce drug costs, as all other developed countries do, even those without single payer systems. In fact, medicare could do this, too, if congress hadn’t passed a law specifically to prevent it. Walmart can bargain drug prices down, but not medicare.

OK, if none of those things are the reason that medicare for all will not work in the US, what is the reason? It’s actually much simpler than any of these things.

With well over half a billion dollars per year spent lobbying government on behalf of companies and interest groups that profit from the current system, and with between $1 and $1.5 trillion dollars of revenue per year that these interest groups stand to lose if the US instituted a medicare for all system, it will never be tried.

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[BiBottomBoy]

Yep. And t hose lobbiest own the congress.

[RA1]

If they did not, what would be the point?  

Hospitals are taking over the practice of medicine in the US and therefore the admin costs will only go further up. 

Best regards,

RA1