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A comment on Health system sues thousands of patients, seizes pay and puts liens on homes. Parent comment

Re:Health system sues thousands of patients, seizes pay and ... by rayiner on Tuesday September 10, 2019 @10:22AM (#20928507)
We also spend more to get less than Europeans on many other dimensions. There is no reason to believe that we'll be able to cut costs to European levels when we can't do anything else for European levels of spending either. (For the same price as Maryland is spending to build a suburban light rail, Denmark is building a fully automated subway line underneath downtown Copenhagen with more track miles. The notion that just making the public sector handle healthcare will bring costs down to European levels is utter fantasy.)

At the very least, I think you have to assume we won't be more efficient than Europe in terms of getting healthcare spending down to a lower percentage of GDP. If we get healthcare spending down to 11.3% of GDP like France, we still have to find about $2 trillion per year in taxes to cover that cost.

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Re:Health system sues thousands of patients, seizes pay and ... by dragonwriter on Tuesday September 10, 2019 @03:33PM (#20932577)
> At the very least, I think you have to assume we won't be more efficient than Europe in terms of getting healthcare spending down to a lower percentage of GDP.

At the same share of GDP, we’d still be vastly less efficient per capita.

> If we get healthcare spending down to 11.3% of GDP like France, we still have to find about $2 trillion per year in taxes to cover that cost.

No, you only have to find a bit under $0.8T, because public healthcare spending is already a little over $1.23T of the $2T it would be under that model. And I think people would be happy to lose ~$2.3T in private bills for ~$0.8 in additional taxes.

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Re:Health system sues thousands of patients, seizes pay and ... by ceejayoz on Tuesday September 10, 2019 @03:23PM (#20932409)
> If we get healthcare spending down to 11.3% of GDP like France, we still have to find about $2 trillion per year in taxes to cover that cost.

Are you asserting $2T in taxes is somehow worse than the current $3.5T we pay for healthcare (taxes, premiums, out-of-pocket)?

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