this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
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The US government spends more per capita on healthcare than any nation does even though it doesn't cover their whole population, people pay for private coverage over that. Get rid of the inability for the government to negotiate prices with service/medication providers, make the government the sole provider of healthcare (meaning they can dictate how much they pay for medications because they have a monopoly) and ta-fucking-da, you just saved trillions every year.
US tax money pays for 7 separate programs and all that administration.
Medicare
Medicaid
Children's Health Insurance Program
Indian Health Service (IHS)
VA
Tricare
Then all the private insurances for federal employee
Then all the private insurances that corporations pay money to have even more administration.
So that's what 10 times the admin staff that a public program and private option would have?
Compared with Australia: Public (tax money) 1 program: Medicare Private several options such as: Bupas, Medibank, AHM.
Germany also has both public and private.
A crazy part of talking about single payer in America is the hang up over buying out public health providers with tax payer funds.
That never happened in Australia. They simply let private healthcare exist but built new public hospitals that became teaching and training hospitals. By slowly expanding pubic healthcare, which started in Queensland, they simply provided an option for more people to access local public healthcare.
Everyone gets stuck on trying to quick fix all this overnight. If we look at Oz Medicare didn't cover all Australians until 1984. But Queensland became the first state in Australia to introduce free universal public hospital treatment in January 1946. By building public hospitals one by one, training staff, and providing better care Queensland changed the way Australians thought about public va private care.
It costs more to have more administrative staff in America. But we refuse to train new doctors or build hospitals based on the needs of the communities they should serve. Therefore we end up with hospitals that serve shareholders, not doctors, not patients. We provide care for dollars instead of people.
Even if they had to buy all private hospitals, the US government is ready to spend tens of trillions on wars to find two guys hiding somewhere in the middle East, I'm pretty sure they could find the billions required to help them save trillions every year.