Comment by karakoram
2 days ago
>A single-payer universal health care system could cover every American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and still cost $1 trillion less than the system it would replace, according to a new preprint study led by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health.
Studies: Investing in green energy would reduce our reliance on the middle east for oil and create jobs locally
America: Sounds like communism
FWIW, the methodology that produced this particular result is known to have significant issues. The claimed effect disappears after correcting for them. It also isn't the first time that these authors have published similar studies with these issues. They are not a credible source.
Universal health coverage may save lives and money but this study doesn't provide actual evidence for it.
"known" by whom, and documented where? if you're going to just parachute in and say this paper by domain experts is dead wrong, at least link to what you believe shows this to be the case.
> result is known to have significant issues.
So well known you neglected to state or cite them? I'd invite you to do so now.
ok so we're just dismissing the paper with zero substantive counterclaims then?
Please cite and explain what those significant issues are. As it is your post is a "trust me bro", and is not contributing to the conversation.
$1 trillion less profit.
$1 trillion more efficient in allocation of resources, freeing up money for consumer spending on everything.
They don't care about this stuff
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As long as that does not translate to good short-term profit, the shareholders won't budge
Are you saying the government is an efficient allocator of resources?
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$1 trillion less middle-men.
Not profit, just income
And most of that income is salaries to existing healthcare administrators. Quickly ending the employment of the people working those jobs would be a significant shock.
Not really. Private health insurance would still exist alongside for the more wealthy (including nearly everyone on HN) that doesn’t want to wait a year for their public system MRI. Same thing that plays out in other countries. The U.S. already has a form of this in so-called concierge / premium providers too. Lots of profit to be made.
This isn’t true of the Medicare for All Act, for what it’s worth. That would ban private insurance altogether. Personally I think that’s a bug, not a feature, but if you’re very concerned with fairness then you probably think the opposite.
Having the machine capacity to get non-urgent MRIs in hours is part of why US healthcare is so expensive. Anyway, the average (again for non-urgent MRIs) where I live in canada is 9 weeks, which is i am sure skewed due to the rural population. In the city it’s like half that.
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If private health insurance was allowed, UHC would be stillborn. It only works if providers don't have better options than medicare reimbursement rates.
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Total profits for US health insurance companies in 2025 were $50 billion. The other $950 billion has got to come from cutting:
1. money to providers
2. overall healthcare consumption
3. bureaucratic redundancy and waste
1 is going to piss off medical providers. 2 is going to piss of the general public. 3 is going to piss off the 20 million healthcare industry workers who are not direct care providers. So pick your poison. This is why it will never pass.
Have you ever dared to dream of something that sounds impossible but isn't?
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And overhead of running the insurance company like salary and office, then wasted time for doctors.
That would be a massive hit to our GDP.
Just think about the boost to our GDP by having healthier consumers who live longer, don't go into medical bankruptcy, and continue to buy stuff.
In all seriousness, this would be a massive stimulus to the economy. Americans are consumers at heart. All the money saved on insurance and/or other healthcare related costs would then be spent elsewhere.
Cars, clothes, TVs, Labubu dolls. People will use the savings to buy things. In massive quantities.
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Not necessarily, over the long-term. That's $1 trillion more in disposable income.
Not at all. Reducing a cost means the payer can spend the money on something else
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
Are you implying you would decide to sacrifice citizens health for a few GDP points, a somewhat useful but oversimplified metric that doesn’t reflect anything tangible?
Presumably not; the same national income would just be redistributed from shareholders to insurees (or shareholders of companies that pay for employee health insurance).
Think of all the insurance jobs that would be hit, too. Unfortunately we've bloated the healthcare industry to have a lot of employees
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and what about the third yacht? who could afford the third yacht then? huh?