Re:HHS announces rule to protect consumers from surprise med...
by nrmitchi on Friday July 02, 2021 @04:34PM
(#27716537)
I think a piece that you're missing here is that health problems get drastically worse, and more expensive to fix, when they're not addressed.
Problems are often not addressed in a reasonable time frame because many people don't have access to reasonable health care. Even they they do, they may be hesitate to use it. Anecdotally, last time I went for a preventative check, I was given an FAQ sheet when I signed in reminding me that if I ask about anything specific, or diagnostic, that is not preventative (as if I'm supposed to understand the difference), then it would have to be billed separately and may-or-may-not be covered by my insurance. That was almost enough for me to not ask my doctor questions while I was at the office.
I would imagine that more widely addressing issues early on before they become expensive would remove another large portion of overall US healthcare costs.
Assuming nothing else changes, it'll about double the cost of what people pay now for private insurance (in terms of taxes).
However, there's no reason to assume nothing else changes. The US spends an atrocious amount on the overhead of bookkeeping our "free-market" semi-adversarial healthcare system. Estimates over the past 22 years range from 13 to 25% of the cost is raw administration. Assume most of that cost goes away (let's say 90%, which seems fair) and you're left with Americans paying about $250-400 a month more on average in taxes for healthcare than what is paid now.
Since it's taxes, the progressive tax rate would kick in and this would translate overall to most Americans paying almost nothing more, the middle class getting squeezed (this could be ameliorated with laws, but if nothing else changes the middle class gets squeezed), and the wealthy and super-wealthy shouldering the bulk of the cost.