I support single-payer, but it's not going to solve the US health care cost problem - and "solutions" to it are likely not going to be pleasant. Likely, in the practical world, whatever cost control ultimately ends up being imposed on whatever system we have 20 years from now is going to make health care worse. Indeed, what makes US health care so bad right now is in part ineffective cost control measures.
[1] https://www.cbo.gov/publication/56571 [2] https://www.pgpf.org/budget-basics/medicare#:~:text=Medicare....
What it will do, is slow the expansion of cost vs what we'll see in the private sector coverage. That slowdown will be courtesy of the massive-scale, centralized, top-down pricing push-back capability that the government has (and has very strong incentive to use as the years go by, given the fiscal situation).
The cost per capita of the two systems will split apart more and more as time goes by.
The government might enact further measures which will likely have consequences not unlike the current policies
Exaggerated, your premise rests on: the US is not exactly like the Japan scenario, it's 98-99% like the Japan scenario. Point being, that tiny population expansion is trivial and will be mostly gone soon anyway.
The population addition in question is majority lower income, lower education oriented in numbers. The US has an inverted immigration system vs eg Canada or Australia (they focus on higher income, higher education, skill-based immigration). That fact further debases the potency / value of the population expansion. US education has been eroding for decades in terms of quality, so those lower income, lower education new immigrants are entering the US at a particularly mediocre time for their purposes (and they'll also simultaneously run into the automation, robotics, AI buzzsaw that is in the first or second inning; further devaluing what that population expansion brings to the table).
I was very clearly speaking about the overall US immigration system and how it's structured.
Foreign STEM grads quite obviously fall into the higher income, higher education, higher skill grouping that (per my prior reference) Canada and Australia prefer to focus the majority of their immigration on (whereas the US does not focus its immigration in such a manner).
That's absolutely not true, and it sounds like 101 xenophobia. Immigrants in the U.S. are significantly better educated than U.S. natives.
Ref: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/08/20/key-finding...
> Educational attainment varies among the nation’s immigrant groups, particularly across immigrants from different regions of the world. Immigrants from Mexico and Central America are less likely to be high school graduates than the U.S. born (54% and 47%, respectively, do not have a high school diploma, vs. 8% of U.S. born). On the other hand, immigrants from every region except Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America were as likely as or more likely than U.S.-born residents to have a bachelor’s or advanced degree.
Not the OP you're responding to but your own source disagrees with your assertion. Relevant quotes above, emphasis mine. Also, I'm not against immigration but it gets old seeing accusations of xenophobia when someone is trying to have a reasonable conversation about the very real macro-level challenges involved in immigration. Stifling this sort of discourse also ends up being a disservice to people that have worked very hard to immigrate to the US as it can lead to people sweeping under the rug the challenges people will face when arriving.
In the Japan scenario that the US is following, the US is just now getting to where Japan was in the mid 1990s. And that's Japan without the global reserve currency and the numerous financing benefits that go with it.
The US has an enormous asset base to debase against, to eat, before it arrives at truly severe problems. It has plenty of spare taxing capacity across every income bracket.
And as the feds crush the income brackets with higher taxes over time, socialized healthcare will continue to creep up the income bracket, taking up more and more of the market (out of necessity due to cost; middle and low income brackets will lose more of their disposable income to taxation, healthcare will become that much more of a burden).
Interest rates will remain exceptionally low for decades to come. The average rate the US Govt pays on its debt will continue to sink lower over time, as the mountain of debt soars higher. That can continue until at least the range of $60-$90 trillion in public debt (1% - 1.5% on $60t-$90t is where they'll push it to over time). 1% on $60t is affordable right now. The skeptics will proclaim such low rates on such a giant pile of debt is impossible - it's not; they would have claimed (circa the mid 1990s) that what has already happened would be impossible too. Courtesy of Japan, we already know what can and will happen, and so does the Fed (even though they constantly lie about it).
The massive debt accumulation (in government and corporate) will take care of a lot of the inflationary pressure that would otherwise be present, courtesy of mediocre growth (the debt accumulation and maintenance robbing the economy of capital it needs to grow faster; the debt acting as a heat sink, which is exactly what it has done to Japan).
This inflation spike is transitory (the people saying that were too early on the duration aspect though and so they got mocked for it), the labor market is about to crack, growth is at recessionary levels, crypto has crashed, bubbly stocks have crashed. The housing market is going to get hit (although it won't be like the great recession) as the labor market gets rattled, people will shift that much more conservative, and blue chip stocks will get hit harder (blue chips like eg KO, which have largely avoided the damage in the market so far). With mediocre growth and a broken labor market, the inflation wave won't be sustainable over a longer time frame. It's better to think of the present inflation wave as a large one-off reset to higher prices (fallout from the various effects and choices during the pandemic), rather than a persistent ongoing event. That type of inflation burst event might happen from time to time over the coming decades as a consequence to various programs the US Govt and Fed run to try to spur the economy and manage high debt levels. For example, as the economy continues to weaken, the Biden Admin will start talking about trying to do another stimulus shot and or infrastructure.
Corporations have rapidly sapped their pricing power to counter inflation. Consumers can only take so much of that, and I believe we're clearly seeing weakening by the consumer in their willingness to keep absorbing huge price hikes on consumer goods. The corps will begin slashing the human cost soon (both delaying hiring and firing) and pushing automation more (eg if your local Walgreens or CVS doesn't have a self-checkout, it soon will; if your local McDonald's doesn't have digital kiosks, it soon will; they'll push labor cost onto the customer wherever they can).
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edit:
Someone (greyed out account) replied with this, and I thought it was worth touching on:
> there's no way you can convince me healthcare costs will go up if we kick the capitalists out of the industry
Well that's not what's going to happen and it certainly won't be a smooth event (the US wakes up one day with a shiny new socialized healthcare system where costs are tightly controlled with top-down pressure). Rather, socialized healthcare will gradually climb up the income ladder out of necessity, because more and more people will be unable to afford the cost of healthcare. The US healthcare market, simply put, will continue to bifurcate (public vs private). Private health coverage will continue to get more expensive, pushing more people onto government coverage / subsidy. The government side will see a lot more top-down pressure on cost/pricing (the government has a very strong incentive to control costs, given the fiscal condition of the US Government, and they'll act accordingly over time). Only the top 1/3 (give or take) income group will continue to be able to afford private healthcare coverage. Private coverage isn't going away and the healthcare market overall isn't going to be nationalized (ie the Capitalists are not getting kicked out wholly, their sandbox will get smaller and what they can charge will get more restricted).
The US will see a process of gradual, ongoing expansion of socialized healthcare. It will not happen in a big one-off event, as has been dreamed of for decades by the Democrats (they've been making a horrific mistake for decades by pursuing that approach, which was obviously going to fail; a lot more progress could have been made by now via an aggressive piecemeal persistence). The one-off system change premise is a particularly naive fantasy and can be safely disregarded as a potential outcome.
The median American will see a decline in their real disposable income. It'll squeeze them in a lot of different ways as that occurs, including on healthcare, education, housing, rent, automobiles, etc.
The income classes will fail to keep up - as they largely have over the past two decades - with the damage to the USD from the national debt and the actions the Fed has to take to deal with that (the Fed playing the role of both enabler and fixer, when it comes to public & corporate debt levels). The asset classes will be fine, they'll largely keep pace (or better) with the loss of value in the USD, although their taxes are going to go up by quite a bit over time (and there will be many attempts at pursuing wealth tax plans). As the income classes lose ground over time, the government will step in and take over more of the financial context of the healthcare and education markets in particular.