The VA hospital system is a US example demonstrating vastly lower costs with similar outcomes. Scale that to say all of Medicare + all government workers and costs drop enough to cover vastly more people. Now add in other programs like the Ryan White AIDS program which covers ~300,000 people with very high cost care and the supliments to Rural heathcare systems etc and heathcare would look very different and cheaper.
I've made that point numerous times in this thread. I think you're missing my point: the US has to slash a trillion dollars in expenses out of its system. That trillion dollars consists of jobs & people's income & tax base loss. It is not a zero cost transition, it's a massive cost transition. You're talking about it as though it would occur in a vacuum, it would not.
The VA system is not an example of lower costs. You're wrong, it's more expensive than both the private sector and medicare:
http://dailycaller.com/2014/06/02/report-va-health-care-has-...
Further the UA is often covering the most expensive care such as hip replacements, the fact that it's a lower percentage of costs is a result of efficiency of the VA and waste in the rest of the system.
As to lowering costs, economically spending money on heathcare billing vs Rail is only different because Rail provides long term value. As long as total spending is unchanged there is no reason to suspect economic harm.
> As long as total spending is unchanged there is no reason to suspect economic harm.
You mean other than the vast dislocation that health industry labor - and two dozen other industries reliant on that spending - would suffer? People taking pay cuts in healthcare, workers losing jobs in pharma & health insurance by the hundreds of thousands (high paying jobs at that). Your premise would only actually work that way in a simulation (and it'd be a really bad simulation, not accounting for anything in the real world), not in reality. In reality, there is dramatic economic friction that occurs when you fire someone and they have to retrain / find a new job, or when you cut their pay to bring costs in line. There are immense short-term and long-term costs to that upheaval, in reality. Such costs include: unemployment costs, job training, long-term unemployment costs, welfare benefit costs, tax base loss until jobs & incomes are recovered. The US economy is growing very slow, where's the evidence it can absorb such losses and then create a million new high paying jobs (simultaneously while automation is about to bear down on just about every category of employment)?
If the VA spent 1/2 as much money and covered 1/6 of the costs while provoviding the same benefit that would be a good thing. This analysis ignores survives provided because the only way to make them look bad is to pretend spending more money is somehow a good thing.
I agree, there are better systems than France. My only reference to France, is about competitive salaries in the healthcare industry. Wages in that industry have to come down by a lot to match comparables in eg France, Germany, UK.
When people talk about single payer re the US, they focus on drug prices and insurance industry costs. They ignore that essentially every cost in the US system is inflated, including routine labor and dozens of side connected feeder industries (everything from saline supply to the cost of hospital beds to labor costs in elderly care). Most of the cost bloat in the system is made up of salaries for workers such as nurses, doctors, hospital workers, admin and health insurance employees. You could slash pharma costs nearly in half in the US and only save ~$150 billion of the $1 trillion we have to cut out of our costs to get cost competitive again. Every one of these cuts will have substantial economic consequences; cut pharma in half, lose a million high paying jobs directly & indirectly that support the tax base that pays for the single payer system (ie you have to figure out how to replace that; which would occur, but it'd take lots of time).
That said, the way the US is actually going to go, is we're going to do a slow mediocre drift into single payer, through gradual expansion as the existing convoluted system fails one tier after another (essentially failing up the economic chain; the middle class will gradually all be pulled into government healthcare by necessity as the system collapses). Maybe out of desperation they'll use medicare as the platform, since the politicians in Washington DC can never agree on anything it's most likely our result will be to use something that already exists and just enlarge it.