Big reason the hard left and right might bite here is one thing.
They both hate health insurance.
The left wants to get rid of private insurance for single payer.
The right wants to get rid of private insurance for private health savings accounts.
Basic problems with both.
Single payer
- The costs are so high that if the US increased corporate taxes 500% and doubled taxes on the top 10% of earners, it still loses money.
- Every hospital charges Medicare at a strategic loss, so accepting insurance patients at Medicare prices would cause universal bankruptcy.
- Single payer globally hasn’t been a brag system, where high income nations have good healthcare, but places such as the UK run cancer survival rates half of what the US has in certain cases. Things like an MRI also happen to have 5-6x the wait in Canada that the US does.
Some countries are undeniably doing single payer better than the US, but small examples and I don’t see the US making this work.
Private health savings accounts.
- People won’t have enough money. The only reason this is a bad idea is just that healthcare bills can be hundreds of thousands of dollars and someone can save 10% of their income making $100,000 a year for 20 years and it’d only cover six months of what cancer cost.
It doesn’t work, but there has been a valuable point.
Insurance makes things more expensive.
Be it insurance or Medicare for all, people do and would use that model to try and get as much as possible without questioning cost.
Consumers don’t care about cost, because they get whatever they want with both models and never look at cheaper options.
This is why everything in healthcare has become more expensive, except the following.
LASIK
Plastic surgery
Most dental
Dermatology
Big example being with LASIK, where prices are down about 40% nationally in the last 20 years, while everything insurance touches is up over 50%.
Reading the plan Mark Cuban funded research on and I think this may solve that while also getting every demand the hard left wants also with single payer.
Basic pitch.
- If someone can’t afford healthcare, the government loans them the money for it.
- The loans are paid back at 10% of a person’s income, but never more.
- The loans only last 15 years and the interest rate would be small.
Basically, a person can get access to any healthcare services they want, but will have to try and pay it back by spending 10% of their income.
Which sounds like a lot, but the average family in the US spends 14% of their income on health insurance currently. Something they’d not need to do in this model, if they opted to not get insurance and just take everything as a 10% fee.
It’s already cheaper.
It also doesn’t deny people the ability to get insurance, where it’d be cheaper for families/individuals making over $100,000 a year to get health insurance and would make it so 20-40% of the market likely still holds.
It’s also vastly more cost efficient for the government versus single payer.
Just to get an idea of how bad single payer cost wise is.
Liz Warren tried to pitch the idea of single payer and claimed no middle class person would have to have taxes raised.
Solution?
A flat $5,000 hiring tax where any company that hires someone for over six months needs to pay $5,000 a year in additional taxes on that person.
Do that and not have a fantasy that’d cost millions of jobs.
This works, because most people would actually be able to pay back cost entirely or over 50%.
If someone breaks a leg now without insurance, the average cost is $17,000.
If that happened to a person at age 25 and they made $40,000 a year, they’d pay that off in under 4.5 years at a 10% fee.
Which a 10% fee doesn’t sound fun, but that’s better over what they spend on insurance now. Plus, if someone is making $40,000 a year and doesn’t have any healthcare issues, they’d pay nothing until the day they need to.
Also for someone who gets something like cancer, which could cost $500,000, they’d pay 10% of income going forward. That’s normally something for older people, so let’s run the idea that happens at age 40 and the person is making $60,000 a year. They’d pay $6,000 a year and $80,000 over 15 years, leaving the government to cover about $420,000 in payments, but they did come in for almost 20%.
Which sounds like a big loss, but there will be $100,000+ earners, increases to income and just the fact those expenses would be rarer, due to higher risk people tending to be older/higher income and would fall in the 20-40%, where it’s in their economic interest to buy private insurance.
And big reason for this plan.
It brings some of the advantage in health savings accounts with consumer cost concerns.
If a person breaks a leg and it needs a minor surgery, they might search for doctors or other treatment options more carefully, because that can decide if they are paying 10% for the next decade 3 years or 4 years.
Also on things such as prescription drugs, they could search cheaper options, because now those cost are mainly out of pocket entirely, versus insurance as a window. Which prescription drugs are 14% of healthcare spending in the US and this could go down significantly if people pursue cheaper options.
And for more serious things such as cancer, people wouldn’t need to think about payments. The cost will for 90% of people reach the 10% income cap and probably for the 15 year loan cycle. Meaning, they’d not care and patients with serious issues wouldn’t worry about cost.
So is Mark Cuban’s plan good?
Yes, but probably needs work on the regulatory side.
FDA reform
Reform for opening hospitals in the US.
Reverse medical tourism to allow European doctors to practice here.
The bigger issues in healthcare are on the regulatory side versus the payment side, but this seems like an idea which both the right and left can move on.
For the left
Everyone now gets coverage and no one will ever go bankrupt over healthcare.
For the right
Won’t be even 20% of the cost of single payer and gets consumer conservation in healthcare spending.
This idea is something where it sets a mentality that in the US, nobody gets a free lunch, but nobody ever goes hungry.
Really sad that this was an idea numerous economist like Milton Friedman have pitched versions of, but the only one nationally pushing for it is the Mavericks owner on shark tank.