No. of Recommendations: 6
Hawkwin's response over on The Fool put it succinctly. It's easy to do this if you handwave away the difficulty of doing the following:
Four adjustments reduce national expenditure. Hospital and clinical fees are paid at Medicare reimbursement rates, which are below the rates paid by commercial insurers and above those paid by Medicaid. Pharmaceutical prices are reduced through international reference pricing, applying the 51% reduction achieved by benchmarking US prices to those paid in comparable high-income countries. Administrative overhead is reduced toward the level of the current Medicare program, reflecting simplification of billing and insurance functions under a single payer. Fraudulent billing is reduced, consistent with the experience of other single-payer transitions. A further reduction comes from averting emergency-department visits and hospitalizations that improved primary-care access would render unnecessary.
