Comments on: “Sick” - Jonathan Cohn’s Book on the Healthcare Crisis http://brainblogger.com/2007/07/13/sick-jonathan-cohns-book-on-the-healthcare-crisis/ Topics from multidimensional biopsychosocial perspectives. Tue, 06 Jan 2009 08:34:30 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.7 hourly 1 By: Stephen Weinberg MD http://brainblogger.com/2007/07/13/sick-jonathan-cohns-book-on-the-healthcare-crisis/comment-page-1/#comment-250120 Stephen Weinberg MD Sun, 13 Jul 2008 15:47:26 +0000 http://brainblogger.com/2007/07/13/sick-jonathan-cohns-book-on-the-healthcare-crisis/#comment-250120 The general comments about our health care system are correct, but in fact the truths are more problematic. US citizens who earn enough to pay taxes actually pay $11,000 per person or $44,000 for a family of four to cover health care for themselves and for others in the country. This includes the cost of health insurance, taxes to cover Medicare, Medicaid, local health clinics for the indigent, and state sponsored payments to cover uncompensated care given by hospitals. The costs of health insurance and the out of pocket expenses to cover deductibles and copayments are a relatively, but painfully, small part of the overall costs that we all pay for health care in this country. As insurance premiums continue to increase, employee contributions, deductibles and copayments will also increase. this will dramatically raise the number of uninsured and underinsured. The only way to bring this problem under control is to create a system of universal health care supported by a single payer system paid for by a unviersal payroll tax and additional payments for people who do not work. This will cost dramatically less than we are paying now. Savings could amount to, in excess of, $400B annually. Consider "Medicare for all" with an overhead of 1.6% {the current Medicare overhead} versus the private health insurance system with a current overhead of >20%. The hidden costs of our multipayer system amounts to more than $600B per year which could be eliminated by a single payer system. The proposal of "Medicare for all" is not socialized medicine, as has been characterized by propaganda from the insurance industry Further, senior citizens love the system in that it provides freedom of choice of doctors, hospitals, testing, treatments, medications. No Medicare recipient that I have known in the past 30 years of practicing cardiology has had any negative comments towards Medicare. Contrast this with the existing system of private health insurance where freedom of choice of the above issues is limited and you must often get permission from the insurer to be treated. That is more socialized than the Medicare system. A more detailed, annotated discussion of this issue can be found in <strong>US Healthcare on Life Support: Resuscitating the Dying System</strong>. Additional information is at <a href="http://www.health-financing.com" rel="nofollow">www.health-financing.com</a> . The general comments about our health care system are correct, but in fact the truths are more problematic. US citizens who earn enough to pay taxes actually pay $11,000 per person or $44,000 for a family of four to cover health care for themselves and for others in the country. This includes the cost of health insurance, taxes to cover Medicare, Medicaid, local health clinics for the indigent, and state sponsored payments to cover uncompensated care given by hospitals. The costs of health insurance and the out of pocket expenses to cover deductibles and copayments are a relatively, but painfully, small part of the overall costs that we all pay for health care in this country. As insurance premiums continue to increase, employee contributions, deductibles and copayments will also increase. this will dramatically raise the number of uninsured and underinsured. The only way to bring this problem under control is to create a system of universal health care supported by a single payer system paid for by a unviersal payroll tax and additional payments for people who do not work. This will cost dramatically less than we are paying now. Savings could amount to, in excess of, $400B annually. Consider “Medicare for all” with an overhead of 1.6% {the current Medicare overhead} versus the private health insurance system with a current overhead of >20%. The hidden costs of our multipayer system amounts to more than $600B per year which could be eliminated by a single payer system.
The proposal of “Medicare for all” is not socialized medicine, as has been characterized by propaganda from the insurance industry Further, senior citizens love the system in that it provides freedom of choice of doctors, hospitals, testing, treatments, medications. No Medicare recipient that I have known in the past 30 years of practicing cardiology has had any negative comments towards Medicare. Contrast this with the existing system of private health insurance where freedom of choice of the above issues is limited and you must often get permission from the insurer to be treated. That is more socialized than the Medicare system.
A more detailed, annotated discussion of this issue can be found in US Healthcare on Life Support: Resuscitating the Dying System. Additional information is at http://www.health-financing.com

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