Joe Biden: “How Are We to Pay for Single Payer Healthcare Alias Medicare for All?”

Joe knows the answer to this question and he is baiting the other candidates. Joe has a history of supporting big business interests as witnessed by his aggressive support of the banking industry with bankruptcy laws favoring banking against the needs of citizens and with a special intended harshness when it comes to student loans. Joe has sponsored or cosponsored every bankruptcy bill since 1997. With his question and his healthcare bill, I believe Joe  is courting the healthcare industry and the healthcare insurance industry’s support. Other candidates need to call Joe out on this.

Before moving to Medicare4All or a form of it, we need to attack the costs of healthcare which are rising at a clip greater than inflation.

Much of the payment for improved healthcare will come from negotiating with pharmaceutical companies, reducing the increasing cost of hospital inpatient and outpatient care, rolling back unnecessary pricing increases, reducing costs to 120% of Medicare costs today, etc. There are enough cost targets to attack which should provide a wealth of lower costs and funding for expansion. Healthcare Cost Drivers Pharma, Doctors, and Hospitals

Kocher and Berwick gave an outstanding recital of how we will get from Medicare and Commercial Insurance to just Single Payer Medicare4All. “While Considering Medicare For All: Policies For Making Health Care In The United States Better.” It is unlikely, Congress will move on Medicare4All in the beginning. It will take time. Today’s Medicare is not free from issues.

As the Director of Medicare and Medicaid and upon departing the position, Donald Berwick made this observation of today’s Medicare:

“20 to 30 percent of health spending is ‘waste’ that yields no benefit to patients, and that some of the needless spending is a result of onerous, archaic regulations enforced by Medicare and Medicaid.

He listed five reasons for what he described as the ‘extremely high level of waste.’ They are overtreatment of patients, the failure to coordinate care, the administrative complexity of the health care system, burdensome rules and fraud.

Much is done that does not help patients at all and many physicians know it.”

Within the PPACA, the issues with ACOs must be fixed. The initial PPACA ACO strategy has given hospitals the ability to exploit the market through consolidation, eliminating or minimizing competition in regions, leading to increased pricing, and enabling the employment of specialist doctors, making them “must haves” in insurance networks. As planned, the ACOs should have generated administrative cost synergy and quality benefits instead of enabling ACOs to consolidate and control prices.

Single payer does not use ACOs. In single payer, the government will pay hospitals, healthcare professionals, pharmaceutical and healthcare supply companies. The government will also set the budgets for hospitals and healthcare. Single Payer in Vermont was going to fail and failed due to cost because it used 3 ACOs to manage its plan. Bernie Sanders is also using ACOs in his plan. “Why the Bernie Sanders Bill Is Not Single Payer” The only fear I have of this type of arrangement is the influence of the healthcare industry on those determining pricing and accepting costs. The healthcare industry is attempting to establish a methodology using value brought to the patient clinically and in quality of life with resulting benefits to the health-care system and society also. It is an argument on the issue of the morality of higher prices. Single Payer will have to contend with this as much of the pricing argument is not justified.

The plan should be to gradually move from insurance administered healthcare (what Kocher and Berwick propose) to a single payer system similar to what Sanders proposes but minus ACOs. As I explained, there are enough cost targets to pay for much of the implementation to be derived from reducing costs in the present healthcare system.

Run75441 (Bill H)