The Best Health Care Fix You've Never Heard Of

[Jarqui]

50. I've been talking about the trillion dollars private insurance handles and %s related to that

115B or 961B is 12.0 % of those private insurance dollars (without me looking up whether I agree with these figures). And a bunch of that $115 billion can be gotten rid of with single payer - more than all-payer or the ACA.

Further, when you go down through the hospitals and doctors, with single payer, further administration costs disappear at a roughly similar rate because for the most part, they're dealing with the Federal single payer system. They're not dealing nearly as extensively with patients, as many insurance companies as frequently, collection agencies, red tape, etc on administration.

As well, the average US deductible (ballpark) is $1,135. In Canada's single payer, apples to apples, there is no deductible. The above math focused on premiums and payout seems to overlook that but comes out of American's wallets. Studies looking at premiums and payout to providers either ignores the deductible or lowers the medical ratio.

Canada covers ALL of it's citizens with no deductible for 62.5% of the US health costs per capita and Canadians have a longer life expectancy. It's a rough example of what is possible in the US with single payer.
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.PCAP

Using Canadian single payer rates as a target, the US savings for single payer might roughly be:
US healthcare costs per capita..... $9,146
- CDN healthcare costs per capita - $5,718
============================
US Single payer savings per capita $3, 460

$3,460 savings per capita x 318 million US population = $1.1 Trillion per year

Or we could say the savings from spending 62.5% of the $3 trillion the US currently spends is $1.1 Trillion.

So that's a fair cross check to reinforce that talking about hundreds of billions of dollars in savings for the US to migrate to a single payer system like Canada has is not beyond the realm. That's the order of magnitude. Not the tiny 4% you claim - it's closer to ten times that.

It's massively BIG BIG bucks.