Originally Posted by
Oneuli
What makes you think it appears wrong? I am debating it. I've laid out my reasoning, backed up by lots of numbers, for why the right-wing Mercatus Center estimates for the cost are too high. To summarize: Australia and Canada --arguably the two nations most like the US, demographically and culturally-- each have Medicare for all, and the cost in each is less than half what the Mercatus boys tell us it would cost here.
I've also laid out my reasoning for the statement that even if the Koch propaganda were right, that would STILL represent a net savings. Their own number has the annual budget hit for Medicare for all being well below what we currently spend on healthcare, much less what we're projected to spend over the next ten years.
And I've laid out my reasoning for why it's affordable in tax terms -- I've shown how a tax hike that wouldn't even be sufficient to bring us up to the average per-GDP tax burden for developed nations would be enough to cover the transition.
If you dispute those arguments, it would be helpful if you did so with specificity, so we could dig in.
I assumed you'd used a biased propaganda source --the right-wing, Koch-funded Mercatus Center-- because the number you quoted was the one they've been shilling. Was that incorrect? If not, please feel free to share your source. And if your view is that my source is dubious, explain why you believe so.
That's the whole point: I just showed how it actually is SIMPLE to pay for all those people's healthcare without bankrupting the economy. This isn't just a hypothetical argument. We have about three dozen test cases of other nations --nearly all of them with less to work with than us in terms of GDP per capita-- have managed to afford higher-quality healthcare for all without bankrupting the economy. Why would the US, alone among all wealthy nations, be unable to do that?
I've shown how the numbers work. I've shown how even if our system, for some reason, wound up being twice as expensive as Australia's or Canada's per capita, we could still cover it with a tax hike that would leave the US relatively under-taxed (a lower tax burden as a share of GDP than most other wealthy nations). If you don't think those numbers work, could you identify why?
I've been very specific. I provided plenty of international benchmarks, and gave you the numbers to work with. What more would you like?
If it cost $32 trillion (over ten years), that would put its per capita cost at over twice as much as the per capita cost for essentially the same system in Canada and Australia. Why do you think it would cost us more than twice as much as it costs them? If anything, it should cost us less to buy the same things, since we have better economies of scale. We have bargaining power against drug companies, and bulk-purchasing power, that Australia and Canada could only dream of.
Let's take this out of the political sphere, where emotions cloud reason, and just re-imagine it as a business problem. Let's say you run a business with 5,000 employees, and you want to figure out how much it would cost to provide $100,000 of life insurance for each of them. So, you track down data from other companies. You find two companies with roughly the same kind of workforce you have, in terms of age, ethnicity, job functions, etc. You find that for them, a year of such life insurance costs an average of $30 per employee. Each of those companies is a lot smaller than yours, so they have less bargaining power to get a good price. So, how much should you expect the same benefit to cost you, per employee.
Well, if you work for the Mercatus Center, maybe your answer is $70 per employee. Maybe you think that despite those economies of scale, the best you could hope for is to pay over twice as much as those other companies do. But is that reasonable?
Again, take a look at what it costs in other leading nations. In Canada, the TOTAL COST of health care per person is $4,752 -- not just the tax hit, but everything, including all out-of-pocket expenditures. Would $4,752 be 60, 70, or 80% of your pay? I don't know what you earn, so maybe. But most of us would see net savings if we moved to that kind of system (which, remember, would drastically lower average out-of-pocket expenses, as well as replacing the existing health insurance and Medicare hits to the paycheck.
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