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Quote of the day
If the United States simply had the per-person health-care costs of Switzerland, which has the second-most expensive health-care system in the world, we would spend $3,000 less per person and save about $900 billion a year. Assuming we need to reduce deficits by about $4 trillion over the next 10 years, those savings would do the heavy lifting with about $5 trillion to spare.
Simon Owens is a PR consultant and journalist. You can read his blog, follow him on Twitter, or email him at simon.bloggasm@gmail.com
24 Responses to “Quote of the day”
If the United States had the same per capita real Federal government spending today as it did in the year 2000 (aka the year of budgetary Nirvana), it would save about $1 trillion per year, even more than the comparison with Swiss health care spending.
And of course, young Ezra is confusing government health care spending with total health care spending and assuming that all the savings accrue to the government.
To wit, Federal health care spending (net) is actually less than $900 billion. Medicare and Medicaid spending were $800 billion gross and $620 or so billion net of offsetting receipts in 2010
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/120xx/doc12039/HistoricalTables%5B1%5D.pdf Table E-9
Thus, Ezra’s implicit argument is that he could “save” more health care spending than the Federal government actually spends in total.
Now maybe in the land of the left this passes for an analytical insight but boy oh boy, it’s really a pretty god awful stupid one.
If we’re going to have “guest voices”, can we at least have them from people who know the basics of the budget when they post on budgetary matters?
Yes and the Swiss do it all with a population of about 30 million compared to our 300 million. We have 40 million without any healthcare “insurance” at all.
In this country, the business of healthcare is sucking our people and our country dry, while the insurers make record profits on schedule.
Our healthcare “system” is immoral, inhumane, and, fiscally stupid. A massive capitalist failure that the Republicans like to falsely blame on everything and anything but the capitalists that are raping this country raw.
Thanks for the irrelevant and off topic post Allen.
Hope you enjoyed it.
Nope, dead on topic considering medicare costs.
The HCR we got was pathetic compared to what it should be. Sure, we have great healthcare in this country, but it’s expensive to the point of absurdity, and as Allen points out, the number of citizens who are left out is more than the entire population of Switzerland. We probably could have real HCR but it can’t happen when only one party wants it. The tea-publicans have no ideas, their go-to word is always no.
Well Ezra is off about the fact that all the savings would go to the gov’t, but he’s not wrong that we are being bilked for “whatever the market can bear” here in the states for health insurance. It would still amount to massive gov’t savings with the rest going to taxpayers so there is some merit to it. As long as people want to keep going along as if the healthcare industry itself isn’t the major problem we are going to be screwed.
I’m all for charging thru the roof for recently developed medical procedures you can’t get anywhere else, but what about the more common medical expenses, fixing broken legs, staying overnight for observation, MRI’s, why are we paying 5x what they are charging in other countries for those? Where are the economies of scale coming into play? Answer: they are being buried under layers of free market bureaucracies that would put any state run bureaucracy to shame. And they are doing so because they can hide the billing practices that result in the massive bills people HAVE to pay when they get sick or injured. Lets not pretend “shopping” for medical care is like shopping for a car.
slamfu-
I must agree with you 100%.
And what are the infants doing? Trying to shut down and sabotage the first step towards reforming the system in decades, because a democrat was behind it.
Excellent how quickly this became a general post about liberal health care dreams. I guess that’s what happens when leftists are clearly wrong. They move on to a topic they like better.
EVERY modern country has Socialized Medicine.
EVERYONE of them!
Not the U.S..
Capitalist medicine fails in quality and in affordability by comparison to Socialized Medicine.
No other country wants a system like ours, rather they are appalled by ours.
Only Republicans stand in the way of Healthcare reform that would provide full cradle to grave medical benefit. At less the cost. The only thing they offer to these obvious facts are rhetoric.
There is no excuse for continuing Republican intransigence. None.
Anyone who claims that other countries hate the U.S. system should explain all the Canadian license plates in the parking lot of the Duluth hospital and clinics.
I am not saying we couldn’t learn a lot from Canada, but the talking points about the wonders of single-payer systems overlook a lot of the real world. If we are going to design a system, we should learn from their flaws as well as their virtues.
Well said, LP. The other guys system always looks better through the haze of gauze.
I guess decades doesn’t cover the Nixon health plan that TK shot down as he did to Carter’s plan.
“Anyone who claims that other countries hate the U.S. system should explain all the Canadian license plates in the parking lot of the Duluth hospital and clinics.”
Yeah. Something tells me a lot of those cars are pretty new and pretty expensive.
The HEALTH CARE is pretty awesome.
The system SUUUUCKS, as does the party defending it.
Every time I get sick or injured or someone I care about is affected similarly, I am reminded why I dislike the GOP so very very much.
Switzerland sounds like a lovely place. Their health care system is a lot like Obamacare: citizens are required to buy private health insurance from a set of heavily-regulated private insurers.
And like us, they haven’t solved the cost problem. Their costs didn’t drop when they adopted their national health system in 1994, nor have they dropped since. Over the past decade their costs have been increasing by about 6% per year, same as ours.
So yes, it would be nicer if our costs were more like theirs. But obviously that isn’t going to happen unless we can solve the big problem: how do we make health care get cheaper over time?
Simple Prof…lower HCP compensation and ration care by whatever means you prefer (restrict supply, price controls, etc.). That’s what every public or quasi public system in Europe has done and that’s all we have to do.
Funny, I don’t hear a lot of advocates for either of those approaches but I’m sure they are out there somewhere.
Sry Dr. J, keep getting you and the Prof confused.
Yup, only the Dems have proposed health care reform, or care about the citizens of the U.S.
The rest are blood sucking capitalists. (Puhleez, no some in between argument, we are demagogues.)
And it has failed for every single one of them. No European country has achieved decreasing or even stable health care costs over time.
Ezra’s implication seems to be that if we just do more like the Swiss in some respect–perhaps ski more?–our costs will tumble. It’s not working for them, so why would anyone expect it to work for us?
What’s the illegal immigration situation over there. Do they have them (how many) making cuckoo clocks which then pays for their health care.
How many people use their emergency rooms for all their medical problems at no charge so the hospitals have to raise the costs to all their other patients with paper cuts from franc notes.
Different system/society, no comparison.
Duck, I’m glad you made the Nixon reference. Of course if he was around trying that HCR today he would be denounced as a far leftie. That is how deep we’ve been sliding into a starboard trough ever since. Funny how the right exacerbates problems and then complains about how unrealistic it is to resist accomodating them.
It’s also funny that the most liberal of the Dems
killed both efforts. Exacerbation can cause warts on the hands of both parties, they just have switched roles every once in a while.
[shaking head] They (so many liberals so often alien here in the USA as well as being unrealistic to extremes here!) won’t face reality until it strikes them once the Baby Boomer retirements end the feasibility of evasion and of other forms of deliberate (and accidental, incompetent) ignorant. Allen? Spence?
You’re wrong about Nixon, Spence. Too far left to be a “stellar” GOP member today, yes, just as JFK would be too far right even to be tolerated at all by liberals today, who would loathe him. But the times (liberalism still on the ascendant, living off the growth after World War II, 1973-1974; conservatives then were considered freakish or mentally ill by culturally-compromised, slanderous liberals) were different than they are today.
All we know is that the far Left would foam at the mouth at Nixon.