I just got off the phone with a person who thinks that single payer health care in VT will generate $2B in NEW TAXES. That is $3,333.33 per person. Now, lets look at this. 6.8% of the state is uninsured. Thats about 42,760 people. About the population of downtown Burlington. What this person thinks, is that insuring 42,760 people will cost $2B. For the record, that is an insurance cost of $46,772 per additional person. This is an outlandish claim. The mistake this person is making is this: Everyone who has health insurance is paying that as a tax levied by their employer (often shared by their eployer who pays part of the tax also). Insurance costs about $3.3K per person, on average, in the state of VT, about $2B to insure the entire population. Single payer health care is less expesnive than standard health care because the overhead shrinks from 28-100% to just shy of 12% (if you live in Switzerland, the most expensive single payer system in the world). For those of you who think single payer is more expensive, it is not. It has been proven over and over, that while single payer is not perfect, it is the most cost effective way of administering care to large populations (look at Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA - and ask a veteran if they want their insurance privatized, they do not...they like their socialized medicine). This is fact. Like gravity it is not up for debate. This person thinks that this $2B will be in addition to money that is already being spent. It will not. There will be a shift. It may be painful for the first year. Employers will stop taking money out of your check (in my case for a massive deductible plan that was such a hassle that I didnt even use the HSA money they gave me, I just paid the damned bills), and stop paying money from their revenues to insurance companies that MAKE PROFITS FROM TRYING TO AVOID PAYING FOR YOUR HEALTH CARE. What will happen is that income taxes, both corporate and personal, will be redirected in similar amounts to what they have been for insurance premiums now. There will be a lessening of the burden overall, because it will cost less money to have sick poor going to doctors instead of emergency rooms charging bad debt. 99.99% of us will not pay more. We will pay less. And frankly, I would gladly pay more to have a useful plan.
Posted on: Fri, 17 Oct 2014 22:27:40 +0000
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