Will the Affordable Care Act make health care more affordable?

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Permalink Reply by Steven Chaisson on January 15, 2012 at 9:22am

Yes, its possible. Luxemburg has had a single payer system 100 years and its never been in the red. It is comparable to healthcare in the United States with better outcomes. Citizen are taxed 7% of income. The hospital and physician run private practice and the government runs the insurance plan which contracts fee with the providers every years. Citizen paid for healthcare out of their pocket and are reimbursed by the government insurance system. Private insurance is also available. Our next step needs to be to lower the reimbursement rate to physicians from Medicare, also remember we have private companies that do the transactions for Medicare and their are inefficient and add a lot of cost. But physician have powerful lobbyist in Congress, for six years they have stopped a reduction in reimbursement. 

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Permalink Reply by John F.J. Sullivan on March 1, 2012 at 12:10pm

In the short term it's impossible to imagine anything but a huge spike in health care costs, but as Steven and others have pointed out, a single-payer system has the potential to engender significant savings and increase efficiency. In theory, anyway. As the old saw goes, in theory there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.

And, of course, the Affordable Care Act is far from a single-payer system, unless that single payer is defined as "everybody, but to a lesser extent, the insurance companies."

That said, it really would be something to see an adult, non-rhetoric-laden cost-benefit analysis of single-payer universal health insurance as it relates to a large, heterogeneous and not-particularly-healthy United States. 

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