Single payer healthcare?

[zandperl]

What is it?

This time I'm looking for the three paragraph synopsis. The three four sentence synopsis I got about it this weekend is as follows:

Money goes from the person to a fund and *then* to the health insurance company. People don't sue doctors at all. It saves you money. It's better than the current system and has no drawbacks

Comments

[q10]

i'm pretty sure there aren't any robust pairwise logical dependencies between any of those four sentences.

[zandperl]

*nods* That's my point. They have to be drawing these conclusions from additional information - information that I do not have and am requesting.

[q10]

my point was that the lack of things following from each other was even worse than what you'd explicitly remarked on.

[zandperl]

Okay, so "health insurance companies" are the current "multiple payers," and the payees in either are the doctors - I didn't get that before. So in SPHC how much coverage you get and what percentage it is, you don't have any choice? Or does the patient/employee not contribute ANYTHING and the gov't pays everything? And if this latter situation is the case, won't that up taxes hugemendously and therefore it isn't clear outright whether people pay more or less overall?

Maybe I misunderstood what others had told me, and really the cost savings is from the billing departments?

[zandperl]

So your argument is that billing costs are reduced in SPHC and therefore we'll probably pay less. Doesn't the fact that there's competition now make our costs lower than they could be, though? And what about the bureaucracy inherent in having the gov't do it, won't that make costs higher too?

Has anyone actually done studies that really concretely show that SPHC would save me money?

[seekingferret]

There are two ways to do universal health care. SPHC is one of them, and it's the one that's more free market friendly. It allows for-profit health care providers, but the government is the insurer that pays for health care for everybody. The theory is that this will streamline billing systems, reduce malpractice suits, and cover people currently not covered, yet without requiring the government to maintain an entire health care system like, say, England has

[zandperl]

reduce malpractice suits,

How? I can see it reducing suits over bad billing, but not over doctors' actions.

To start with the obvious, it'll mean raising taxes as the government will have to cover costs it currently doesn't. (To counter this, those in favor say that the tax money is money people would have spent on private health insurance- this is only partially true).

Ah yes, that's one of my questions. We'd need a detailed analysis of the cost to answer it, though.

I'm under the impression that in many countries with a SPHC system, it's impossible to see a specialist. Do you know if this is a necessary result of SPHC, or just some implementations of it?

[seekingferret]

I think it's all in implementation. I don't think qualitative analysis of this is actually very interesting to debate. Problem is, quantitative analysis of the details is very complicated and very difficult and very contentious because it requires speculative math. But Ken has promised me that he'll take me through the quantitative details if I can find a good run-down of them, and this is exactly what Ken does for a living, so...

[zandperl]

I'm under the impression that Medicare/Medicaid is a SPHC system, but it is clearly NOT universal. Or there could be a SPHC system only for public employees - especially if it's my union arguing for it.