Good article Jordan. It's really curious to me how people (not referring to Jordan here!) in politics have a hard time conceptualizing healthcare as a cost of living issue itself. If you showed me a poll that showed cost of living as a top concern, it would naturally make logical sense to me that part of alleviating peoples concerns over the cost of living would be bringing down the cost of a mandatory spending item like healthcare. Similar to food or housing, healthcare is something you have no choice in paying for.
While I think it's annoying that a lot of performative super-online people talk about obamacare like it was useless (it obviously was a huge improvement over the previous state of affairs) it remains true that healthcare clearly is not a solved problem. As mentioned in the article simply maintaining the current status quo ad infinitum is doesn't strike me as good politics. Excited to fight over the public option again for yet another presidential primary.
I think we spend WAY to much time worrying about who is paying and not nearly enough on how much the total cost is for the system as a whole.
The simple fact is that we can't afford the extra subsidies to Obamacare (which were supposed to be temporary), nor can we afford Medicaid or Medicare.
We've promised WAY more than we are willing to pay in taxes, and a lot more than other countries are paying.
Now it's true that other countries use rationing to keep their costs down (and pay their doctors a lot less. Doctors in the UK make on average $170k, doctors in the US make $260k on average).
But still there's a lot to be done. There are two ways to hold costs down, one is through price controls/rationing. The other is letting the competition bring costs down.
But of course for competition to work, you need price transparency. Which means we need to mandate that all prices are posted online AND prevent providers from charging different prices depending on who the payer is.
Providers shouldn't charge $100,000 for cash payers, $20,000 to an insurance company and $10,000 to Medicaid (which is usually below cost and is a hidden subsidy).
Make it the same price, so people can shop around easily, make providers compete on price. And make it easy for consumers to shop around (and make sure they have skin in the game)
Then focus on increasing healthcare supply faster than healthcare demand.
Remove the caps on residency slot
Import doctors from other countries with qualified medical programs
Make it easier for non doctors to provide care
get rid of certificate of need that stop competition
Then let the magic of markets work.
Note, less than 10% of healthcare is emergency care. Over 90% of the time people could shop around if it was easy to do.
I think it's worth pointing out that it's not as if healthcare stopped being an issue in *other* developed countries after they introduced government subsided/provided systems! It usually tends to be an effective way for the centre-left to cudgel the centre-right.
Like I am a bit baffled as to why people are only doing polling and polling averages on immigration and the economy. In most of the world there are traditionally winning issues for the conservative side of politics, progressives win elections on healthcare!
Good article Jordan. It's really curious to me how people (not referring to Jordan here!) in politics have a hard time conceptualizing healthcare as a cost of living issue itself. If you showed me a poll that showed cost of living as a top concern, it would naturally make logical sense to me that part of alleviating peoples concerns over the cost of living would be bringing down the cost of a mandatory spending item like healthcare. Similar to food or housing, healthcare is something you have no choice in paying for.
While I think it's annoying that a lot of performative super-online people talk about obamacare like it was useless (it obviously was a huge improvement over the previous state of affairs) it remains true that healthcare clearly is not a solved problem. As mentioned in the article simply maintaining the current status quo ad infinitum is doesn't strike me as good politics. Excited to fight over the public option again for yet another presidential primary.
I think we spend WAY to much time worrying about who is paying and not nearly enough on how much the total cost is for the system as a whole.
The simple fact is that we can't afford the extra subsidies to Obamacare (which were supposed to be temporary), nor can we afford Medicaid or Medicare.
We've promised WAY more than we are willing to pay in taxes, and a lot more than other countries are paying.
Now it's true that other countries use rationing to keep their costs down (and pay their doctors a lot less. Doctors in the UK make on average $170k, doctors in the US make $260k on average).
But still there's a lot to be done. There are two ways to hold costs down, one is through price controls/rationing. The other is letting the competition bring costs down.
But of course for competition to work, you need price transparency. Which means we need to mandate that all prices are posted online AND prevent providers from charging different prices depending on who the payer is.
Providers shouldn't charge $100,000 for cash payers, $20,000 to an insurance company and $10,000 to Medicaid (which is usually below cost and is a hidden subsidy).
Make it the same price, so people can shop around easily, make providers compete on price. And make it easy for consumers to shop around (and make sure they have skin in the game)
Then focus on increasing healthcare supply faster than healthcare demand.
Remove the caps on residency slot
Import doctors from other countries with qualified medical programs
Make it easier for non doctors to provide care
get rid of certificate of need that stop competition
Then let the magic of markets work.
Note, less than 10% of healthcare is emergency care. Over 90% of the time people could shop around if it was easy to do.
I think it's worth pointing out that it's not as if healthcare stopped being an issue in *other* developed countries after they introduced government subsided/provided systems! It usually tends to be an effective way for the centre-left to cudgel the centre-right.
Like I am a bit baffled as to why people are only doing polling and polling averages on immigration and the economy. In most of the world there are traditionally winning issues for the conservative side of politics, progressives win elections on healthcare!