[quote=FlyerInHi]NSR, real quick here before I go back to home remodeling.
Your equation lacks the total amount of services. You focus on profit while aggregate health spending/revenue is much more important. Trump wants more services to cover everyone for less total spending. Let’s see how he solves the equation. He won’t.[/quote]
He won’t. Essentially, single payer is how to bend the cost curve, but that’s anathema to the GOP. I’m not emphasizing profit, I see it as an excess and questionable if necessary, cost. The main benefit of those profits is the innovation in services and treatments.
You bend the cost curve (in aggregate) in three simple ways:
A) You reduce the overhead (insurance companies, their required administrative burden and their profits).
B) You reduce the cost of services (either by reducing the cost of providing service or by limiting access to higher cost services [i.e. proton therapy]), or implementing price controls such that companies like Mylan can’t game the pricing market.
C) You reduce the demand for services.
“The People” are really clear, they don’t have an tolerance for C if it impacts them. Nor B, if it means they have to wait or can’t get their desired option. And if you really want to piss them off, tell them the cost benefit of treatment 2 doesn’t warrant the extra cost over treatment 1, that the specialist has told them is sooooo much better.
Which really just leaves A. And if you refuse to do “A” then the only option you really have to play a shell game of shuffling costs so that 60-80% are less impacted and the remainder is just short of porked.
Again, the math is really simple. If your family (and a bunch of others like it) uses on average X dollars of services, insurance (in aggregate) has to charge your family $X + administrative overhead + profit.
Or make the Doctors charge less (and make less), make the drug companies charge less, etc.
It’s a lot like the budget, after years of reduction in the deficit, we still have a deficit that is over 40% of the discretionary budget. Not counting defense spending which our President said he wants to increase spending on, it accounts for about 80% of the non-defense budget.
We want our cake, we want to eat it too, and we don’t want to pay the bill.
