[quote=harvey][quote=livinincali]Health care spending is included in the measurement of GDP. If GDP is 15 trillion and health care is 3 trillion of that then reducing health care spending by 1 trillion reduces GDP by 1 trillion.[/quote]
You do understand that government spending is included in GDP?
Why would a third of total healthcare spending just disappear simply because the government is paying the bill instead of insurance companies or private consumers?
Where does this trillion dollars in economic activity go?[/quote]
I agree that if we continue to spend 3 trillion per year on health care then changing who pays that 3 trillion dollars doesn’t do anything to GDP. However everybody here seems to think single payer or some other government fix would be to reduce the total spending on health care, not who pays for it. If we do indeed reduce spending on health care in aggregate then GDP would go down and we’d have a recession.
Ultimately Obamacare really just changed who’s paying to some degree. Overall health care spending didn’t go down because of. It did buy a couple years of a slower growth but recently health care spending is going up at the previous ~6% per year. Obviously that growth in health care spending can’t continue forever so something will happen but I don’t know what that will be. At some point you need to remove some of the overhead and layers of profit in health care and when you do it will effect the economy on the whole.
When we embark on that path it’s going to be disruptive in the economy and it’s one of the reasons the politicians don’t really want to do anything. They are all smart enough to realize a major overall of health care is going to disrupt a couple million jobs maybe more. Trump did get elected in part because people are still upset about that manufacturing job or mining job they lost in the 90’s. We put a bunch of billing coders and administrators and insurance agents out of a job with single payer they are going to hold it against you for a very long time. Will we be better off in whole, certainly, but it won’t be fun for the people that have to deal with the disruption.
