Fair enough. $10,000 a year. Still wrong. $10,000 is about the average premium for a family - and insurers don't quote rates that will lose them money. Individual rate is about $4000 a year. Canvasing government healthcare around the world shows that the rate per individual is at most half of what Americans pay - so instead of paying $10,000 to the insurance company every year you would pay $5,000 more in taxes - a saving of $5,000 a year. I don't know too much about how the various plans work but deductibles look pretty high - so how does that work with doctor's visits?
This subject is complex enough it may warrant a thread of its own. I think considering anticipated population growth and inflation, it would be more like $8,500 per person in the first year. But I'm not going to do the mental gymnastics to figure out their exact methods, not read the Libertarian think tank's papers at this point. For the sake of this thread we'll just say $10k.
That seems a little high, but not much. The US medical system is an absolute mess that got 10 times worse under Obama. My work based family plan cost literally doubled throughout Obama's 8 years in office. What people see taken out of their work check towards medical is not the full cost of the insurance. Companies usually pay much more into insurance than the employee ever sees. This is called "Burden". With my last company I got to see what employee burden was, which was 32.8% of the employee's salary. If you make $100K/year, they company also allocates an additional $32k towards benefits that the employee never sees or is taxed on. A lion's share of the Burden goes towards various medical/dental/vision insurance. Higher paid employees force more burden (and usually pay more out of pocket), while lower paid employees account for less. Ironically most corporate pay structure is a form of socialism.
Almost all insurances have a crap ton of deductibles and copays. It is not unusual for an person to have to meet a $4,000 deductible before the insurance company will pay a dime. I'm talking about a typical company plan. That all started under Obama's presidency BTW, it never used to be that way before Obama. Even after the deductible is met, patients are still responsible for other fees like a percentage of doctor bills (20-30% is common), prescription costs, you name it. That's not even getting into dental. Dental insurance is a complete joke, but you have to have it just for some sort of artificial discount. Eye glasses insurance is an even bigger joke. It's such a joke that i don't even enroll in my company's plan. I just pay out of pocket.
Then you have the fact that a portion of the country does not have insurance, sometimes completely due to their own will and not because they can't afford it. The simple fact is it is law that emergency rooms cannot turn away anyone. They cannot ask for insurance before seeing a patient, and they cannot ask for payment at that time. A portion of the population uses the emergency room as their health care plan. Even people with cancer getting kemo treatments use the emergency room. It's not ideal for catastrophic medical needs, but it is a fact of what is going on. The vast majority of the billing for emergency room visits go unpaid by the patient.
Additionally, all of the medical providers of any type are gaming the system. All of the costs for everything has skyrocketed. There are a number of reasons, but it all boils down to the fact that free market capitalism does not exist in US healthcare. Well, almost does not exist. There is a tiny submarket for cash customers, but they are hard to find. I know it exists because a close friend dealth with testicular cancer about 5 years back and he had no insurance. He found a small support group that helped identify providers that accepted cash. Those providers were a fraction of the cost of going through insurance. I do mean a fraction. For the really expensive procedure(s), he even had some leeway to haggle the price down. Problem is, very, very few places accept cash any longer.
Finally, once every man, woman and child is fully covered no questions asked, the volume of visits will skyrocket.
Like I said, this could get long winded and may require a new thread. I don't think the $10k/person figure is all that far off.
