'Easy to Pay for Something That Costs Less': New Study Shows Medicare for All Would Save US $5.1 Trillion Over Ten Years

I would be shocked. Absolutely shocked... If the savings weren't much, much more.

Health insurance companies are leeches.

Anyone who disagrees has never tried to pay for healthcare. Even if you have "good insurance" there's always something stupid going on.
Doctors have no idea how they get paid, and they pay another company to work with insurance companies. That other company is impossible to contact, so if there's any issue the insurance company and the payment company blame each other. "Oh the insurance company rejected it incorrectly" or "the payment company coded it wrong."
- Yea, I have 128k sitting above my head for almost a year now as the hospital and insurance talk. This was a surgery that was pre-authorized. They paid for everything else including the nursing facility I was in. The last part in the OR bill.
- It's far worse than that. I work in healthcare and literally just talked with a patient who was charged more at a walk-in clinic with insurance than they would have paid without.
  Their visit would have cost them $250 without, they were billed $300 and insurance paid for another $150 on top of that. And it's not like they pay nothing to have insurance in the first place.
  The system is fraudulent from the ground up.

What about the shareholders Bob? Who’s looking out for them?

Could you imagine? All those sick people who would stop working til they die? Harumph.

I literally work with at least 3 people that are ONLY working at my job for the healthcare... One dude is 68 and gets covered in aluminum dust all day just for the fucking healthcare.
You're goddamn right people would not be working those absolute shit jobs if it weren't for healthcare being tied to work.
Bootlickers: "WeLl ThEn HoW aRe ThOsE bUsInEsSeS sUpPoSeD tO sUrViVe AfTeR!?"
- 68?
  Am I missing something? Shouldn't he already be eligible for Medicare?
Why don't you read the article? The proposed system still has employer payments, but promises reduction of these payments which should give a good boost for businesses.

*$5.1 Trillion will not go to big businesses and corporations

Which is why they'll fight to the death to not allow us to have a good thing.
- Government for the people who own corporations, by the the people owned by the corporations. That's the quote, right?

The US government spends the most per capita for healthcare and that money is used to cover only a minority of citizens.

People are then paying extra for private insurance over that.

Having a governmental monopoly for healthcare is the best because the government can decide how much medications and services cost, the providers don't have a choice since they only have one client and that client's goal isn't to make profit or to make sure others are making profit, its goal is to pay as little as possible.

Norway has universal healthcare for everyone. Going to the ER is free. Ambulance is free. Surgery is free. Checkups and tests are heavily subsidised where we only pay a small fee (like $20). If you spend more than x-amount on fees annually, you get the fees waived for the remainder of the year.
We have health insurances, but that will only allow you to go to private clinics with less wait times. These insurances are normally paid by employers with highly skilled workers. It's not considered to be a necessity.
The Norwegian healthcare isn't cheap, and we pay around 35-40% income tax, and 25% VAT, but our income doesn't dictate what type of services we're allowed to get. Poverty is low, and crime rates are low.
Socialism works.
- We do not really pay 35-40% income tax in practice, it's a progressive tax system
  For example, I pay about 25% in tax on my income, which is roughly the median salary
- Reading "ambulance is free" is still crazy for my European mind. ===> "Of course it is... If the driver asks you for money, we'd put them in jail for years."
A minority? Howso? Does that mean most people are uninsured? Or just that the majority of insurance payments go to less than 50% of people? Or...?
Just hadn't heard that one before, so curious about details.
- Public healthcare insurance covers about a third of the population, the rest are either uninsured or covered by private insurance.
- Ah, I assumed you meant the US in general spends the most, including for public and private.

Is there a study that shows how much potential profit the medical industrial complex may not realize if we made the switch? (Of course in reality, they'd still find a way to get most of "their piece").

Because that's the thing holding it up. Not data-based proof points, or public opinion that universal healthcare would work, we have that and have had that.

I'm pretty sure most corporations are holding this up, actually. They want us to be beholden to them for healthcare so it's harder to quit. And they want us to not have easy access to Healthcare so we can't sue them in class actions for shitty products. I am convinced the class action piece would represent trillions in losses for corporations here.
- Very good point. Military as well, need this and for-profit colleges to make the "benefits" of military service shine.
About 5.1 trillion?

Can't let our health care get in the way of corporate profits.

Oh, but what about those poor middlemen that do so much working keeping prices inflated? What will they do for a living?

Be glad they weren't executed in public for being traitors to their fellow citizens.
Have heard folks unironically make this argument. "The insurance industry! Massive unemployment! My 401k is invested in them! I'll be ruined!".
- That’s not an invalid concern, but those jobs will just transition. Probably not a bad idea for a politician to address this concern since there are probably hundreds of thousands of jobs in insurance.
Won't someone think of the shareholders!
- Think about how many yacht building jobs will be lost!

Medicare is a giant subsidy to private insurance companies because it removes the disabled and elderly from their rolls. And it's also created a back-end for coding claims that the industry adopts. And even with the more expensive patients, and the burden of designing the whole system, Medicare constantly delivers more care per dollar than the private guys.

So, which party supports it?

Bernie Sanders.
- As democrats are so fond of gloating whenever someone brings up their party's abysmal actions during 2016, Sanders is not a member of their party.

Problem being, I'm sure politicians of all stripes have invested heavily in private insurance companies. And those so called administrative fees make it all the more lucrative.

Good luck getting it past all the industry ~~bribery~~ lobbying.

This is what I hate about this country it is crony capitalism from the top down

Republicans don't want this, because while they like to claim "blah blah spending this, spending that", it's not actually about reducing spending, it's about punishing the poor(and a wide range of minorities, obviously). So the fact that giving MORE people access to healthcare would cost much LESS money in the end, means fuck all to them. Their only goal is maximizing the suffering of anyone who ain't them, and convincing their base that someone else is the cause of all of their troubles.

Democrats meanwhile, have no interest in doing this either, since most of them aren't even remotely progressives(whether they pretend to be or not), and like the Republicans, it doesn't do much to line their pockets. As long as they can keep everyone just fucked over enough, while pretending to support progressive policies, the can keep pointing at the Republicans as boogeymen, saying "look, see what the right wants to keep from you? Better vote for us, or you'll get trump again. ThIs iS THe mOSt imPOrTAnt elEcTIon oF yOUr lIfe." But as soon as you vote them in, where does all of that support for those progressive policies go? POOF Never to be spoken of again, until next election, because they didn't ever really support such policies in the first place.

So sure, I'm not going to go so far as to say that both sides are the same. Because clearly one side at least isn't trying to bring back literal Nazis. But make no mistake, even if you have to vote Democrat to desperately keep MAGA out of power, the Democrats are not your friend. Democrats are not leftists. The are center right, at best. It's just the Republicans have completely lost the plot, and ran so far to the right, that everyone else looks to be left by comparison.

The header is misleading. Read the article and the details of that research. To make it work they propose to add 3.75% sales tax on everything except necessities, wealth tax for >$1mil net worth, tax capital gains as ordinary income, and keep existing Medicare paycheck tax same and employers contributions but slightly smaller.

It might be fairer system, and it will be more humane system for lower middle income folks who cannot afford health insurance and don't qualify for Medicaid.

But it's a lot of new taxes. They say that for top 20% earners the net healthcare cost will be higher. And all the lobbying from insurance business... i just don't see this could pass.

We either:
pay $3,240,000,000,000 to the middle men/corpos/yacht funds every year
pay $2,930,000,000,000 to the government to provide actual service without bullshit denials of service
The cost is overall less, but shifted to taxes, which is how basically every other country that has their shit together does it. The choice is pretty obvious for anybody even slightly paying attention.
Anyone who cares doesn't matter.
Health care is already a lot of “tax”. I am paying $2200 a month for my family.

Dave M. Van Zandt has no academic media literacy qualifications. He's not a social scientist. He should not be running a site that is being used to censor news feeds.
He admits that his system for judging 'bias' is pseudoscience, but at the same time claims that MBFC's purpose is to debunk pseudoscience. He appears to have no idea what science is. His methods for rating credibility are not public, repeatable, or by his own admission falsifiable.
He is actively harming media diversity and LW should be ashamed for taking this charlatan seriously.