Single Payer Makes a Comeback!

[Nbadan]

Bernie may be crazy about some of his proposals, but he is dead right about Single payer.... needs to happen....

A number of proposals have been made for a universal single-payer healthcare system in the United States, most recently the United States National Health Care Act, (popularly known as H.R. 676 or "Medicare for All") but none have achieved more political support than 20% congressional co-sponsorship.

Advocates argue that preventive healthcare expenditures can save several hundreds of billions of dollars per year because publicly funded universal healthcare would benefit employers and consumers, that employers would benefit from a bigger pool of potential customers and that employers would likely pay less, would be spared administrative costs, and inequities between employers would be reduced. Advocates also argue that single payer could benefit employers by reducing costs, producing a more compe ive labor market and reducing inequities between employers, producing a more fluid economy and increasing economic growth, aggregate demand, corporate profit, and quality of life.[29][30][31] Also, for example, cancer patients are more likely to be diagnosed at Stage I where curative treatment is typically a few outpatient visits, instead of at Stage III or later in an emergency room where treatment can involve years of hospitalization and is often terminal.[32][33] Others have estimated a long-term savings amounting to 40% of all national health expenditures due to preventive health care,[34] although estimates from the Congressional Budget Office and The New England Journal of Medicine have found that preventive care is more expensive.[35]

Any national system would be paid for in part through taxes replacing insurance premiums, but advocates also believe savings would be realized through preventive care and the elimination of insurance company overhead and hospital billing costs.[36] An analysis of a single-payer bill by Physicians for a National Health Program estimated the immediate savings at $350 billion per year.[37] The Commonwealth Fund believes that, if the United States adopted a universal health care system, the mortality rate would improve and the country would save approximately $570 billion a year.[38]

Physicians for a National Health Program[99] the American Medical Student Association[100] and the California Nurses Association[101] are among advocacy groups that have called for the introduction of a single payer healthcare program in the United States. A study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that 59% of physicians "supported legislation to establish national health insurance" while 9% were neutral on the topic, and 32% opposed it.[102]

[Nbadan]

Hillary Clinton re-embraces the public option for health care

Sanders’ plan to simply guarantee health care for everyone would help eliminate the hurdles caused by fears of ineligibility. It would also eliminate the 15% of uninsured Americans who are ineligible for subsidies because they declined an insurance offer from their employers, and the 9% who would qualify for Medicaid if their states agreed to join the federal government in expanding its reach.

http://qz.com/622181/can-hillary-cli...ith-obamacare/

[Nbadan]

The problem is that in the U.S. payers are fragmented while in other countries they are unified even if there are many insurers,” said Gerard Anderson, director of the Center for Hospital Finance and Management at Johns Hopkins University.

In the United States, insurers negotiate with hospitals and drug companies on their own -- and they pay more as a result. In fact, because of their weak negotiating position they frequently use whatever price Medicare is paying as a baseline and then, because they lack the power to strike a similar deal, add a percentage on top. Joshua Gottlieb, an economist at the University of British Columbia, found that when Medicare increases what it pays for a service by $1, private insurers increase their payments by $1.30.

That leaves the United States with the worst of both approaches: Prices aren’t set by the market, but they also aren’t set by the government. Consequently, Medicare’s negotiating power is weakened by the threat that drug companies or hospitals will opt to do business only with higher-paying private insurers. We simultaneously miss out on the efficiency of a purely private system and on the savings of a purely public one.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...-single-payer/

[Nbadan]

[boutons_deux]

Single-Payer System: Why It Would Save US Healthcare


http://www.pnhp.org/news/2015/septem...-us-healthcare

[Wild Cobra]

Bernie may be crazy about some of his proposals, but he is dead right about Single payer.... needs to happen....






Physicians for a National Health Program[99] the American Medical Student Association[100] and the California Nurses Association[101] are among advocacy groups that have called for the introduction of a single payer healthcare program in the United States. A study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that 59% of physicians "supported legislation to establish national health insurance" while 9% were neutral on the topic, and 32% opposed it.[102]

Who pays the malpractice lawsuits?

[clambake]

how about ty doctors pay for suits.

[boutons_deux]

Who pays the malpractice lawsuits?

initially, nothing changes. doctors buy malpractice insurance, just like now

$30M malpractice settlement against doctor who worked at Chicago hospitals

The family of a 6-year-old boy with brain damage has settled a medical malpractice lawsuit for $30 million involving a doctor who allegedly performed several experimental surgeries on the patient.The final and 25th surgery performed by Dr. Mark Holterman in 2011 left the child with an irreversible brain injury and cerebral palsy

In the final surgery performed at Rush, Holterman used a suturing device to attempt to repair the eso us, which was an inappropriate, off-label use of the device, the news release said. Holterman punctured the boy's pulmonary artery, the suit said.

"The fact that Dr. Holterman continually deviated from the standard of care and repeatedly exposed this young boy to the hazards of surgery and risky, novel operations was not only medically careless and personally irresponsible, but it also demonstrated a dramatic lack of oversight from the hospital,"

http://www.chicagotribune.com/busine...222-story.html

[boutons_deux]

‘Public option’ makes a comeback with Clinton’s endorsement

The policy was poised to be part of the Affordable Care Act, but it was ultimately killed by one man, then-Sen. Joe Lieberman, who vowed to join a Republican filibuster and destroy the entire reform effort if the public option was included in the final package. Left with no choice, reform advocates relented.

But the measure’s demise six years ago need not be permanent. Yesterday, in a bit of a surprise, the public option picked up an unexpected proponent: Hillary Clinton. Politico reported:

Clinton’s campaign has updated its website to note her continued support for the government-run health plan that was dropped from Obamacare during the law’s drafting. […]

A new version of Clinton’s campaign website suggests she won’t try to push the public option through Congress, but instead will work with governors using existing flexibility under Obamacare “to empower states to establish a public option choice.” That may be a reference to a waiver program taking effect in 2017 that lets states assert greater control over their health care systems.

It’s worth noting for context that this doesn’t come as a complete surprise. For example, Clinton supported a public option as a candidate in 2008, though she’s said little about the policy since.

For progressives, it’s an important step. In fact, the closer one looks at the cir stances, the more encouraging they appear: Clinton just won the Nevada caucuses, she’s likely to win the South Carolina primary, and one might expect her to feel less pressure, not more, about appealing to voters on the left. Clinton is probably feeling more confident about her chances now than at any point in quite a while.

In other words, her support for the public option isn’t some kind of desperation move, made in haste in the hopes of winning over progressive skeptics; it’s largely the opposite.

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-s...d=sm_fb_maddow

For Hillary, PO is nothing but campaign talk, she knows "realistically" she'll never do anything about it.

For Bernie, PO fundamental to stop redistribution upwards.

[Nbadan]

Great link to learn about single payer and debunk misinformation

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc...=rep1&type=pdf

[boutons_deux]

Clinton's ‘Public Option’ is a Diversion: We Need Single Payer, Medicare for All

Hillary Clinton has always been an opponent of single payer and instead has supported the private insurance industry.

Some have misinterpreted a statement of hers many years ago as supporting the fact that we would have single payer in the United States. But that statement was not in support of single payer but rather was

her threat to us that if we did not accept her managed-compe ion model of reform, we would have single payer.

So what was her campaign to do? They decided to bring back the concept of a public option to appease those who were turning to Sanders because of his advocacy of single payer. They are relying on the meme that the public option is our door to single payer (even though it is not true). But what is her version of the public option?

She says we should build on ACA. She has proposed no new federal public option legislation but she is merely suggesting that the states look at Section 1332 of ACA which authorizes waivers for limited innovations on a state level.

Imagine the difficulties that states would have, within the confines of Section 1332, in building their own intra-state public plan. Unless they used private insurance innovations such as high deductibles, narrow provider networks, and tiered services, the premiums would be unaffordable to most. A single-payer system would be funded equitably through progressive taxes, but you could not do that with a public option since that is only one plan in a multi-payer system.

In 2009, David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler explained in very brief terms why the public option is a flawed concept:

The “public plan option” won’t work to fix the health care system for two reasons.

1. It forgoes at least 84 percent of the administrative savings available through single payer. The public plan option would do nothing to streamline the administrative tasks (and costs) of hospitals, physicians offices, and nursing homes, which would still contend with multiple payers, and hence still need the complex cost-tracking and billing apparatus that drives administrative costs. These unnecessary provider administrative costs account for the vast majority of bureaucratic waste. Hence, even if 95 percent of Americans who are currently privately insured were to join the public plan (and it had overhead costs at current Medicare levels), the savings on insurance overhead would amount to only 16 percent of the roughly $400 billion annually achievable through single payer – not enough to make reform affordable.

2. A quarter century of experience with public/private compe ion in the Medicare program demonstrates that the private plans will not allow a level playing field.

Despite strict regulation, private insurers have successfully cherry-picked healthier seniors, and have exploited regional health spending differences to their advantage.

They have progressively undermined the public plan – which started as the single payer for seniors and has now become a funding mechanism for HMOs – and a place to dump the unprofitably ill.

A public plan option does not lead toward single payer, but toward the segregation of patients, with profitable ones in private plans and unprofitable ones in the public plan.

Hillary Clinton is now showing us how the public option is a diversion from the reform we really need – single payer.

It is up to us, the people, to convince our politicians that single payer is what we want. It will not happen without us.

http://www.commondreams.org/views/20...r-medicare-all

[Nbadan]

[boutons_deux]

But BigHealthCare loves ripping off America for $Ts even more, and how many Congress people does Slick Willy own?