Study: Public Option would save $68 billion through 2020

http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/health-reform-implementation/110321-cbo-public-option-would-save-68-billion-through-2020

Very interesting. Hopefully this becomes part of future health-care proposals.

 

It should have part of this latest wave of healthcare reform, but any bets the whole thing was run through the political wringer and had to be removed to get anything to pass?

It should have been an option - if nothing else, it would have made some of the private providers think before spiking rates. Given the mess we have now, what are the odds that it would have made anything worse?

 

I think they're slowly coming to the conclusion that there will have to be some sort of public option or even a single payer system in the future. Whether they institute the measures is another story.

 

It would have been in there had anyone gone to bat for it. A majority of Americans approved of the public option early in the health care debate. It wasn't until it was spun as a complete socialist takeover that it lost popularity. But no one in the administration or in the Senate stood up for it, so it died.

 

Actually, public options can do one of two things -- increase costs or decrease quality of care. The idea that you can simply remove the profits and *poof* save costs is ludicrous. If you start cutting what you pay doctors, you'll have a doctor shortage. If you have a doctor shortage, then you will have to choose who gets care and who doesn't.

The only way to bring health-care costs down is to cut out the insurance companies -- or government -- entirely for 90% of care. Give you a tax-free account to pay for routine care and then carry high-deductible insurance for hospital visits. By the time you're old enough to need the high-deductible insurance, they

Unfortunately, none of the options that government will consider expands that concept -- the idea that people should be able to pay for routine care themselves, which would cut a significant amount of the costs out of the medical system and add a lot of flexibility (and competition, which would bring prices down). But that, like the other extreme, gets shot down by politicians who don't want to move away from the march to government-run healthcare.

 

Even though I disagree with what the senate passed, I would have had more respect for the current administration if they had pushed through what they believed would work best rather than one that has been compromised so many times that nobody seems to be that thrilled about it.

 

Where exactly are the doctors going to go? Into high finance? Into IT? Foreign countries where they'll make even less?

I'd like to think that a great majority of doctors didn't get into the field just for the money and I'd like to believe that even in a public option or single payer world they would be compensated well into the six figures per year.

If you can't live off that, please kindly fuck off.

 

The doctors will go into private specialties that are high-paying. They already are, and this would make it worse.