Presidential Election 2020

On 4/30/2019 at 8:08 PM, SC_RNDude said:

“Charles Blahous, a senior research strategist at George Mason University's Mercatus Center, on Tuesday said, "Doubling all currently projected federal individual and corporate income tax would be insufficient to finance" Medicare for All.”

https://freebeacon.com/politics/expert-doubling-income-taxes-wont-even-cover-medicare-for-all-costs/

Naysayer Charles Blahous AGAIN? How about another opinion?

First Medicare For All would NOT increase the income tax. It would be a tax for healthcare that would be, for most, considerably less than employer and individual insurance costs. 

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 A report by the Mercatus Center’s Charles Blahous, who spearheaded President George W. Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security, is the latest entry in this fuzzy math sweepstakes.

Happily, for those of us who seek health-care security for all Americans, Blahous and his friends miss the point. Our commercial health insurance system is crazy and unsustainable, and Medicare for All is the only realistic path to reduce national health spending and improve the quality of our health-care system...

...   The new Medicare For All proposal improves and expands the current Medicare program, replacing commercial health insurance with federally administered coverage for all Americans. The proposal eliminates premiums, deductibles and co-pays, and includes new coverage for vision, hearing and dental care. It allows everyone to use the doctors and hospitals they know and trust, anywhere in the country, without the restrictive networks, arbitrary denials and high out-of-pocket costs that go hand in hand with commercial insurance...

...   Medicare for All gives doctors and hospitals the freedom to compete for patients without insurers getting in the way...

We spend more than $3.3 trillion a year on health care — about 18 percent of gross domestic product. That’s twice as much per capita on health care as the average of other high-income countries. In return, we get health-care outcomes that rank dead last among our peers. Health-care costs in this country are projected to increase by 5.5 percent a year over the next eight years. You do the math: The status quo doesn’t work. Period.

...   Medicare for All, by contrast, provides a compelling path to keeping health-care costs in check. To begin with, Medicare for All would eliminate the administrative waste and profit margins created by the commercial insurance system with hundreds of insurers negotiating different agreements with thousands of health-care providers. Total annual savings on administrative costs under Medicare for All are estimated as high as $500 billion a year (far more than Blahous estimates in his report)...

Medicare for All would empower the federal government to use the collective bargaining power of 330 million Americans to reduce the cost of health care, something that commercial insurers have been unable to do. Blahous himself estimates that the extension of current Medicare rates to all health-care services coupled with lower prescription drug prices under Medicare for All would eliminate $445 billion in annual costs in 2022.

...   In all, Blahous concedes that Medicare for All would reduce national health spending by $2 trillion over 10 years, even after accounting for the cost of guaranteeing everyone coverage and offering better benefits...

So how will we pay for Medicare for All? The same way we pay for the defense budget and everything else: through taxes. Does that mean that ordinary Americans will pay more under Medicare for All than they pay for health care today? No....

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/yes-medicare-for-all-is-expensive-thats-not-the-point/2018/08/01/0b4a0708-95a8-11e8-80e1-00e80e1fdf43_story.html?utm_term=.9ad9a54749b4 

A  Heritage Foundation study comparing cost of Medicare and private insurance

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Comparing Medicare and Private Health Insurance Spending

It should be noted that the calculations are confined to spending for hospital and physician services. Those services are common to both private insurance and Medicare, and represent the bulk of health spending. ...

...   Spending for hospital and physician services by private insurance grew 18.1 percent faster than comparable Medicare spending between 1970 and 1999.

Spending trends began to diverge in the late 1980s, coincident with Medicare's move to price schedules and crackdowns on fraud and abuse in the traditional fee-for-service program....

 ...   In 1970, private insurance paid for 59.6 percent of total private spending on hospital and physician services. By 1999, insurance paid for 85.4 percent of the total.

The percentage of health spending that was paid directly out of the pockets of beneficiaries declined as insurance financed a growing share of health services...

Over the past 30 years, although private insurance costs rose more quickly than Medicare, cost per unit of private coverage grew more slowly.

The gap between higher Medicare costs and lower unit costs of private insurance first appeared in the late 1970s and has widened in recent years...

Conclusion:  Although private insurance spending has risen faster than Medicare spending over the past 30 years, the value of private insurance has grown just as rapidly. These data suggest that Medicare does not have an advantage over the private sector in limiting the growth of health care spending.

https://www.heritage.org/health-care-reform/report/comparing-medicare-and-private-health-insurance-spending

To me the conclusion of the above opinion does not make sense if you pay attention to the numerical facts.

Yes it is an old opinion from 2003. 

Here is a 2017 publication:

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Comparing administrative costs for private insurance and Medicare

...   Administrative costs are the expenses incurred by medical insurers that are not strictly medical, such as marketing, customer service, billing, claims review, quality assurance, information technology and profits...

First, we’ll break down the numbers.

To measure the administrative costs for Medicare, we turned to the 2017 Annual Report of the Boards of Trustees of the Federal Hospital Insurance and Federal Supplementary Medical Insurance Trust Funds -- the document prepared by Medicare’s fiscal overseers.

The trustees’ summary listed total Medicare expenditures of $678.7 billion for 2016, of which $9.2 billion was characterized as "administrative expenses." That works out to 1.4 percent...

...   That covers salaries and expenses, patient outreach, and fraud and abuse control by the Health and Human Services, Justice Department and FBI, among other things.

But because much of Medicare piggybacks off Social Security, other administrative costs such as enrollment, payment and keeping track of patients are left to the Social Security system. That’s one of multiple reasons using the current administrative costs for Medicare wouldn’t translate as cleanly if the entire population were to be covered. (Medicare serves those over age 65 currently...    (With Medicare For All everyone would be covered my Medicare, thus adding to administrative costs)

...   A February report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research totaled overhead costs for private individual and employer based plans at 12.3 percent in 2015. And America’s Health Insurance Plans found that 17.8 cents of every premium dollar goes to operating costs...

...    When the Congressional Budget Office broke those costs down, they put administrative costs in the nongroup market at 20 percent, small-group market at 16 percent and the large-group market at 11 percent...

...   The difference is still pretty substantial, though...

But a lot of administrative costs go to marketing, because private health insurers have to compete for clients. That’s something Medicare doesn’t have to deal with, and which wouldn’t be a problem with a similar universal health plan...

https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/sep/20/bernie-s/comparing-administrative-costs-private-insurance-a/