Health savings with Medicare for All

Here’s more information about why Medicare for all would save us so much:

Medicare-for-all would save hundreds of billions every year. Private insurers expend enormous sums for insurer commissions, advertising, Wall-Street-scale executive compensation, and profits. In contrast, Medicare spends little or nothing on these unnecessary, unproductive activities. Health care providers and private plans struggle with thousands of different billing schedules. As the New York Times reported: “The average provider — doctors or hospitals — has between 5 and 100 reimbursement rates for the same procedure. . . . A hospital chain may have 150 rates for the same procedure.”

In contrast, Medicare districts employ only one. That helps explain why Medicare’s nonbenefit expenditures require only 4 percent of benefit outlays while private plans expend far more — on the order of 20% for publicly traded companies and as much as 31% of premium for some. We are talking real money. A recent McKinsey Quarterly article found that medical care insurer billing consumes more than $300 billion a year, costing 15 percent or more of medical outlays. Medicare-for-all would make do on a sliver of that. (Harvard Medical School economist Rashi Fein tells the story of a former colleague working at a Montreal hospital, where three people processed bills there, primarily for traveling Americans. Later he worked at Chicago’s Michael Reese Hospital, where the billing facility, jammed with clerks at computers, stretched a football field’s length in two directions.)

Understand that Medicare uses private insurers to administer its program and pays private providers to deliver care; patients select their providers, a choice many private plans limit. Medicare confines its payments to a fee schedule it promulgates after receiving the advice of the Medical Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), which comprises a variety of practitioners and others. That price constraint reduces costs. But the big savings come from simplified billing/payment procedures.

In addition, Medicare delivers its benefits at lower cost than means-tested programs like Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Absorbing all such programs (and there are many) into Medicare would save tens of billions more and speed up providing care.

Opponents dismiss Medicare-for-all as a “one-size-fits-all” formula. Well, who among us knows how to estimate when we or a family member will need medical care? Who among us can gauge when a heart attack may strike or a drunken driver will cross the median? In this world full of uncertainty, we all share the same need for assured medical care — that’s the size Medicare-for-all fits.</blockquote>