"Nothing current government does affect cost of medical care"

This is a shockingly ignorant statement, the kind of cheap criticism that comes from someone very far away.

Did you know that CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) is the largest American healthcare payer?

In 2015, private insurance total healthcare expenditure was $1,072.1 billion ($1.072T).

But Medicare and Medicaid spent $1,191.3 billion ($1.191T).

The federal government's ability to act a single healthcare purchaser larger than the entire private market has a dramatically large effect on the cost of medical care -- it suppresses as the rock-bottom CMS rates are significantly below private reimbursement.

Of course, this only examines the impact of the federal government directly on the market as its largest participant -- it does not BEGIN to examine the massive statutory/regulatory influence the government has on the price of health care.

>If anything, they suppress flow of cheap money to medical providers which only inflates its costs even more.

It's the exact opposite.

CMS/federal healthcare spending is the ultra-low cost one, flowing an enormous sum of cheap-per-person money to any service provider that will take them.

It's the massively-inflated private reimbursements which service providers love.

>The largest shares of total health spending were sponsored by the federal government (28.7 percent) and the households (27.7 percent). The private business share of health spending accounted for 19.9 percent of total health care spending, state and local governments accounted for 17.1 percent, and other private revenues accounted for 6.7 percent.

https://www.cms.gov/research-statistics-data-and-systems/sta...

The more you know.

It costs the UK £123.7b to run the NHS for a year: http://www.nhsconfed.org/resources/key-statistics-on-the-nhs

America spends more than 7 times that for private health insurance.

Something's wrong.

It is not wrong, americans, because they dump so much money into private and federal insurance, only to get the most health care it is physically possible where in UK they are much more conservative with spending tons of money on anything possible.

This is both good and bad. Bad for expenses. Good for medial innovation, since this industry attracts alot of funding to do more innovation.

Is that a fair comparison? The UK has a population of 65M, which is about 1/5 of the US @320M.

The UK still probably gets a better bang for the quid - at least until the Tories' mismanagement of NHS comes home to roost.

Health care spending per capita for 2015 was $4,003 for the UK and $9,451 in the USA.

So while 7x is not accurate, 2.35x is nothing to cough at.

It doesn't mean medical care is more expensive or less efficient here, it is just that americans buy more of it. https://www.quora.com/What-makes-the-US-healthcare-system-so...

> Did you know that CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) is the largest American healthcare payer?

True, but the numbers you post are misleading, in that CMS is not the payer for total Medicaid spending (state governments are, and CMS reimburses some portion of te State spending, which varies by state, beneficiary attributes, and other factors.)

It is not in interests of government to negotiate it hard. If anything - they will lose budget. Same with private insurances - unless it hits their bottom line, they will not negotiate and simply accept slowly increasing medical care costs, and push costs to payers (just like government will push costs to taxpayers)

Having less of insurance money (both federal and private) will make pool of cheap money less which in effect should drive price lower. So if anything, attempts of current government to decrease amount of cheap money means that it might only move costs lower.

Granted, these changes are minor in dollars, so effect will be not very visible.

Stop paying for family doctor visit via insurance - and you immediately see costs going down. (also please decrease cheap money available to student to get loans without any qualification to pay for it and you will see tuition fees going down)

Cost of insurance is so unrelated to the cost of healthcare, that when my grandfather recently went in for a procedure, no one at the hospital could tell him how much it would cost. They just take the amount that was negotiated with his particular insurance company. Different people get charged different amounts, and there is no way to get a "quote" ahead of time!

Not true; the government has an enormous impact on the cost of health care. The American health care system is enormously inefficient, costing almost twice as much for less effective care than most other developed nations. How can this be other than because of the government?

One source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_the_healthcare_s...

Higher expenditure can be due less efficiency (btw, what we are going to do with all the inefficient people, pay them welfare?) or due more money spent on more procedures. Is it bad or good - I am not going to say.

> Nothing current government does affect cost of medical care.

Off the top of my head:

* 68% of all medical costs in the US are borne by governments (MediCare, Medicaid, VA, public-sector employee programs). They aren't allowed to negotiate drug prices in effective ways, driving up their costs

* Most health insurance in the US is employer-sponsored specifically because of Congress-created tax law. Without it, the individual market would probably be much healthier and more competitive.

* Congress is responsible for legislation that forces all emergency rooms in the US to provide life-saving care to any person, regardless of their ability to pay. @see EMTALA [1]

* "COBRA" [2] (pricy emergency health insurance coverage option after you leave an employer) was created by Congress.

* Governments set laws which define how and when litigation can be applied to medical workers + hospitals. Legislators could decide to enact tort reform, should they choose to.

* Governments control the medical licensing requirements and how graduates of medical institutions from other countries can work in US health care (they currently can't, for the most part).

* FDA and other government regulators control how fast new drugs come to market (and can effectively price some potential drug makers out of the market).

* Congress controls patent regulation

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_an...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolidated_Omnibus_Budget_Re...

"current government does" i mean literally does right now. Everything you mentioned is either not going be significantly affected, or not affected at all by current government.

In general I agree that removing taxation completely out of the picture as a way to to pay for medical care will make health market healthier. There are very little reasons to pay for routine family doctor visit, or x-ray via insurance.

Ignoring state specific insurance programs like medi-cal, medicare funded care for over 50 million Americans in 2015. To say the government doesn't affect cost of is care is a bold claim.