Obamacare is certainly the worst of all possible solutions. Doing nothing would likely have been better although those with pre-existing conditions do see a benefit under Obamacare. Obamacare is a throw more money at it solution to a problem that is being caused by exponentially growth in costs. Just removing some of the anti-competitive laws, like re-importation of drugs and opening up the licensing of more diagnostic testing centers (i.e. why does it cost so much more to have an MRI today than it did when the machine was invented, even though the technology is the same) would reduce costs more so than the ACA.
Let’s just say we do go with single payer and we limit costs to 10% of GDP which seems to be around many of the other socialized medicine country. So we decide we’re going to spend 1.5 trillion on health care. So then we need to decide what we’re going to tax to pay for that 1.5 trillion. Let’s say we use income tax to fund 2/3 of that 1.5 trillion or 1 trillion dollars. We’ll get the other 500 billion from corporate taxes, co-pays, and maybe some kind of wealth tax. What would that mean for your paycheck. Well there’s about 8 trillion dollars in income that subject to tax each year. So that would mean 1/8 = 12.5% tax rate to your paycheck to pay for single payer health care. That’ about 10% more than you’re currently paying for medicare/medicaid. You really think big corporation providing health care are going to bump your salary up the amount they used to contribute for health care or do you think they’ll keep most of that to pad their profits?
