I will have a longer post shortly on a “model” that single-payer health system advocates put out supposedly showing big savings, etc. from moving the US to a single, government-run payment system. In the meantime, one of the primary advocates for this, David Cutler, has published yet another of his delusional op-eds full of misleading information and outright lies. I would think that the experience of other countries with this system would be enough to show that they don’t save money, unless care is rationed and denied, or you can adopt the Canadian approach, which is to simply kill citizens with high health care needs. No one gets better care than an American with a private health plan, no one has better outcomes for a specific disease. Everywhere else care is limited, some treatments aren’t even available.
Among the idiotic claims Cutler makes is that administrative costs would be lower with a single-payer system. The federal government spends an incredible amount of money administering Medicare, Medicaid and other health programs and they don’t even do most of the basic administrative work, like processing claims. Private plans do that. He says people would get more preventative care, but the research shows that fee-for-service, government-run Medicaid and Medicare do a much worse job at that than do the contracted health plans for the same programs. And so on. But at least he has become more realistic, as he notes that from a budget perspective this is impossible. He might also have taken a lesson from Obama’s disastrous Un-affordable Care Act, which has driven costs up for everyone. (JAMA Article)
