Subject: Re: Trump To Allow Crypto In 401K's...
As to the inevitable increase in cost if we switch to single payor, have to disagree. We already have a system in place, Medicare, that runs a 3% overhead cost. Moreover, there are parallel systems for comparison in every other industrialized country in the world who deliver better care, (when adjusted for the total % of people covered, not just your concierge plans), at a lower cost.

But neither of those things is relevant to the issue.

Switching to a universal single-payer system means providing health care to all the people who are currently uninsured and uninsured. That will dramatically increase the amount of health care services that get provided in the country, relative to the status quo. This is a good thing. Lots of people suffer adverse impacts because they aren't receiving medical treatment.

However, that's going to drive up how much we spend on health care services as a country. Insurance overhead is a trivial amount of health care expenditure. Other countries in the world provide health care at vastly lower costs because they pay providers less for health care, not because they don't have private insurance mechanisms. You don't save much money by taking private insurance out of the picture - you save money by imposing dramatic price controls on health care providers.

And we're not going to impose dramatic price controls on health care providers. If we switched to a universal single-payer system, we'd certainly see the same outcomes we have now in Medicare - where the U.S. pays pretty much double what every other country pays for their 65+ health care, per capita. Because the lower overhead cost doesn't matter a hill of beans if you're paying twice as much for health care services. And our political system is not going to impose dramatic economic hardship on an industry that constitutes about 10% of GDP and employs 10% of all workers. It's just not going to happen. Even progressives can't even talk about it - they only talk about going after pharmaceutical companies or health care insurers, because those industries are unpopular and have narrower employment bases and are more geographically concentrated. No one talks about wanting to cut the budget of the local hospital by 43% (or whatever number), because unlike those big bad health insurance companies the local hospital is one of the largest employers in the congressional district.