The fact of the matter is that we who are insured and pay taxes, pay for the uninsured through higher premiums and higher taxes. Since you are interested in health care costs, you might want to look at the demand side of costs, and the oversupply of unneeded services.
Overall, we have too many hospital beds. Our occupancy rates run about 65% when 80-85% would be fine. We pay the excess. As drug companies exploit our increased knowledge of how to control or cure diseases, we will need to realign how care is dispensed. We will need fewer beds.
Speaking of drugs, changes to the seven-year exclusive patent rules would lower costs. For some reason, we start the clock when a drug goes into clinical trials. Start the clock when sales begin and the companies will have longer to recoup R&D costs. That would result in lower costs for brand names.
Want to do away with bureaucracy? Why have 51-Medicaid programs? One program, with uniform eligibility, would make more sense. Speaking of making sense, why is Medicare still a basically hospital bed-based program? The world changed to an Ambulatory Care system decades ago. Changing Medicare would make sense and probably save money.
In 1964, Barry Goldwater opposed Medicare. He suggested that letting seniors buy their own health insurance would increase competition and lower costs. The problem was, most seniors could not afford the premiums. Simple suggestions do not always solve big problems. Medicare was fine when people spent four weeks in the hospital for a heart attack. They now spend less than a week.
I don't want the government controlling everything. I have private health insurance and I oppose Medicare-For-All. I just think we need to consider health care to be a right for all people, not just those of us who can afford it. We need to design and administer the most cost-effective and delivery efficient health care system, integrating private and public sectors into our solutions. That is the approach that was taken in designing Obamacare.
