Study: Single-Payer Healthcare System Would Save Billions

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Republicans talk about wanting to cut government spending and and disingenuously pretend to care about average Americans yet oppose basically any meaningful change to the nation's sadly deficient healthcare system, preferring instead to allow hospital systems, pharmaceutical companies and other sectors of the medical field to rake in billions of dollars.  Meanwhile, millions of Americans go without medical care and millions more forgo  preventive care because of the cost.  Now, a new study confirms that a single payer system would save billions of dollars every year and provide a huge cut in government spending.  Will the Republicans support it?  Of course not - that would be the opposite of their reverse Gospel message agenda of taking from the poor to give to the rich.  The Hill has details on the study findings:

Expanding the nation’s Medicare program to cover people of all ages would save the government billions of dollars, according to a new study released Wednesday.

The study found that a single-payer health care system based on the principles of legislation by Rep. John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich.), the Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act, would save the federal government about $592 billion in one year.

That’s more than enough to pay for comprehensive benefits for all Americans at a lower cost to the public, according to Physicians for a National Health Program, which circulated the study. The extra money would go to paying down the national debt.

The savings would come from slashing administrative waste and negotiating drug prices.

The study was conducted by Gerald Friedman, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

“Paradoxically, by expanding Medicare to everyone we’d end up saving billions of dollars annually,” Friedman said. “We’d be safeguarding Medicare’s fiscal integrity while enhancing the nation’s health for the long term.”

The study comes as Republicans in Congress are pulling out all the stops to repeal President Obama’s health care overhaul. Tea Party Republicans have in recent weeks vowed to oppose any measures to keep the government running after the current funding bill runs out on Sept. 30 if it also means funding ObamaCare.

Here are some excerpts from the study on our broken system:

For decades, health care costs have risen much faster than income in the United States. As a result, total health care spending has risen from 5% of Gross Domestic Product in 1960 to nearly 18% today. While some of the increase in costs in the United States is due, as in other countries, to improvements incare , innovative technologies and greater longevity, costs have risen much faster in the United States than elsewhere because of the growing administrative burden of our private health

insurance system.

 

Because of the large number of separate insurance programs and the fragmented billing system, American physicians and hospitals incur much greater costs for billing and insurance-related activities than do their foreign counterparts. Compared with doctors in Ontario, Canada, for example, Americans spend nearly four times as much on billing and insurance related

activities ($83,000 per physician versus $22,000 in Ontario), and nursing staff, including medical assistants, spent 20.6 hours per physician per week interacting with health plans – nearly ten times that of their Ontario counterparts.

 

In addition to the administrative savings within provider offices, a single payer system could lead to dramatic savings by negotiating reduced prices for pharmaceuticals which cost approximately 60% more in the U.S. than in Europe.

 

A single-payer system would eliminate most of these costs, raising the share of spending going to providers up to the 98% rate for Medicare. With almost a trillion dollars in premiums paid into private health insurance, lowering the administrative ratio to the Medicare rate would save over $197 billion.

There's much, much more, but the foregoing gives the tone of the findings, all of which are common sense.