Correct me if I'm wrong, but Medicare-for-All is just public insurance. It's not a state take over of all private hospitals.

But instead of negotiating a price with you, the hospital will be negotiating with the state. Hospitals can still compete on prices and likely the state will grant contracts for non-urgent services to the cheapest provider..

Modulo, whatever level of free choice is left and what capacity is available, etc..

Disclaimer: In full support of single payer/government managed healthcare

It's not like there is any competition right now? You can't even get a price quote for elective surgery.

Also I wouldn't be so sure that your children don't have significant leverage over you, hehe :) (They probably don't realize how much leverage they have)

You'd think they'd be a bit more invested in the process of healing, but I haven't found much evidence of that. I hope I'm horribly wrong here.

Personally, I don't think doctors are the answer. I used to really like the idea of high-deductible. But eventually, I just came around to the idea that only the gov't can fix it (with lots of tradeoffs in that fix, obviously).

I think they could, but more people would need to be in them and try to do what you did. It needs to be enough people to eliminate the problem where insurance companies like the system being too complex because then you use them instead of paying for it our of pocket.

Insurance companies clearly have nothing to worry about. I might be able to put in extra effort to negotiate my costs down by paying out of pocket, but then it would not count towards my deductible or out of pocket maximum. Even with HDHP, I am still clearly incentivized to just pay whatever the insurance company thinks I should.

It's a great racket to be in, really. They can negotiate the pricing in advance so that they appear to be useful in making my costs lower, while not actually incurring any costs other than paperwork. They hold all the cards and they have captured the regulatory authorities.

I've never had to wait for an elective procedure because I can choose to privately pay for care on a schedule more convenient to me. I have private health cover which tries to compete on this basis.

But if I had any emergency needs, then I'd be treated immediately at any hospital by the public system, which I pay into with taxes. And the waiting list for those elective procedures, if I couldn't afford private care, is a priority list - based on need.

The idea that shortages don't exist in the US is absurd - sure they do, you can't afford critical care then you just don't get it. The US waiting list is infinite.

So if everybody was covered by Medicare, either the providers would be going bankrupt left and right, or the Medicare reimbursements would have to rise - i.e., the price to the government would increase, and the only thing to do about that is to pass it on to the taxpayers.

It's a common misconceptions that Medicare is more efficient than commercial insurance, because on paper it looks that way. But in fact they're hiding their administrative expenses by forcing the providers to do much of their bookkeeping. (Source: my wife used to manage the department in the hospital that did that Medicare financial stuff)

Kaiser, who has a plausible claim to expertise in this field, puts the overhead cost of Medicare at 2%. The raw number is more like 1.4% but Medicare does get to piggyback a lot of the administrative workload on Social Security so perhaps that is why Kaiser's number is higher.

Insurance industry advocates, who are incentivized to provide the lowest number that can be defended, put private insurance overhead at 17%.

The rest of your suggestion -- that Medicare doesn't even pay for the actual cost of service -- is hard to really reason about accurately. Prices and costs are so completely distorted now that I am very skeptical of anybody's estimates of 'actual value.' Things will change dramatically if we eliminate the insurance industry and medical billing field.

Having just experienced first world level healthcare in another country and paying for it out of pocket at 1/20th or less of what it runs in the US, I am certain we are getting shafted.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. I'm sure that number is accurate, if you're looking at Medicare's books. I'm telling you that when you look at the way Medicare forces the industry to handle their charges, it makes the industry much less efficient, both in terms of administering the provision of care to Medicare's "customers" as well as more generally across how the industry handles its accounting in general.

Every hospital (and skilled nursing facility) has a small team of people whose job is to compile the statistics that Medicare demands, and report it annually in what's called "The Medicare Cost Report". Add up 1 or 2 or 5 FTEs across every hospital and SNF facility in the country, Medicare's claimed efficiency is quickly turned upside down. There is some work that providers have to do for other payers, but its scale doesn't approach the order of magnitude of what Medicare forces. This isn't a matter of opinion (like my wife's); this is absolutely factual and objective.

It gets even worse than that. Because the care paid for by Medicare together with that of Medicaid (which is a separate program, but rides on Medicare's coattails for a lot of its reporting mechanics) dwarfs any private payer, hospital information systems (at least the parts that deal with finance) are structured around the way statistics need to handled for Medicare. That squeezes out the ability to do any more traditional cost accounting. This is the reason that the fee for a given service varies so wildly from hospital to hospital: because they're not doing normal cost accounting (but instead tracking Medicare statistics) the don't actually have a good idea of what any given thing costs, so their fee schedules are all over the place. (I'm generalizing here, there are hospitals that do it better, but my anecdata from hospitals we've had close association with show that this problem is quite widespread.)

It's important to note that this industry is a complete bullshit industry with complete bullshit jobs. Their only job is to say no, to stop money from going out of the insurance companies, in any way possible. That is their entire purpose.

Your medical insurance money props up this industry. Every person working in this industry and receiving a salary, and every person owning shares of companies in this industry receiving profits, are taking money that should have been spent on producing healthcare for themselves.

So however many billions of dollars of revenue this industry makes, we would instantly save most of it by getting rid of this industry.

We are, but not by insurance companies. Their profit margins are thin. The issue is hospitals.

Sarah Kliffs idea to reduce the cost of hospitals is price controls: for the government to tell them they cant choose a price, and to ban them from accepting other insurance.

Less than half; US healthcare spending was around 8.5% GDP public, 8.8% GDP private in 2016.

https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...

Even if we take the value to be 50%, my point stands -- the gov't is already heavily involved in funding healthcare in this country. Implementing single payer at this point would simplify quite a lot of bureaucracy.

I propose the other thought experiment: why doesnt medicare just compete in the market with other insurance plans: it charges X and provides the service. If its truly more efficient it will beat all the rest.

Eventually, as this started to be more widely known the Conservative government "fixed" it. Not by paying nurses more, not by lowering the immigration income requirement to match what they pay skilled workers like nurses, but by specifically exempting nurses.

Sorry wasn't awake enough when I first wrote this.

If not, what do you think is currently happening to those people who need mental health care or routine surgery in a non-single-payer system?