So I wake up to find that our government is spending 85 billion to buy AIG, an insurance company, to keep the whole banking system from collapsing.
Can I have my single-payer healthcare now?
The argument against single-payer has been that it would be "government interference" or "socialized medicine."
Other folks have been writing GREAT diaries about the complexities of healthcare, like DemfromCT here, and old blog posts on CEO compensation and health insurance costs here, hereand here.
Let's just look at it in very simple terms.
Healthcare costs 15.2% of US GDP. Highest in the world.
Overhead costs are variously 31% or 22% of that number, i.e. of between 3.4 and 4.8% of GDP.
GDP in 2006 was $13.3 Trillion, so the lowball figure gives us healthcare overhead costs of $452 BILLION PER YEAR.
That's $452 Billion a year, folks, to push paper around. No wonder they think we can afford the Iraq war.
46 million Americans don't have health insurance coverage, so they aren't included in that above number. But somehow their care gets paid for in the system.
Insurance company CEOs are making out like bandits.
People with insurance complain about bureaucratic nightmares, billing problems, delayed or denied payments, getting thrown off insurance for no good reasons, and more.
Doctor appointments in many areas are hard to get, causing shortages (I'm sorry, the doctor is not accepting new patients) or long waits (The specialist can see your child six months from now, that's the first available appointment, unless the doctor is a personal friend of one of your family members, in which case we'll see you next Tuesday).
Is this efficient? Is this worse than socialism? Is it reasonable to waste all this money on overpaid CEOs and a lot of paper pushing, when patients cannot get care, and doctors are leaving the profession due to low fees and hassles?
Now we have seen that the Republican government in office is willing to nationalize, i.e. socialize, an enormous private insurer and two enormous private banks. (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac).
Why can't we streamline our healthcare spending nationwide and nationalize health insurance? Keep the doctors, the hospitals, the systems, just ditch the private insurers and go to one public insurance company with a CEO who makes a mere 550,000 a year.
We'd save a lot of money and more people would get covered. People who can afford fancier private insurance can buy it for themselves. People who want to pay for fancier care can do so. But everybody would get their basic healthcare needs met by paying into a single enormous pool, whose risk would be much more spread out, and whose administrators would not make tens or hundreds of millions per year in salaries and stock option sales.
The whole superstructure of claims, filing, denials, appeals, oversight, billing would get decimated. Reorganized. There's a lot of room in that FOUR HUNDRED AND FIFTY BILLION DOLLARS to streamline operations.
Just saying...
I WANT MY SINGLE-PAYER HEALTHCARE!