Äߧý∩†H♠H䎀;995589 said:
Well first of all thank you for taking the time to come up with a decent response root. If I'm not mistaken you're from the U.K. correct? I'm only asking because I don't think you fully understand how health coverage works in America. Your numbers would be great if that was in fact the case for everyone but it isn't and those numbers are arbitrary.
This is a simple breakdown of how things work. Say a new employer decides he wants to offer health coverage to his employee's. He meets with several different insurance providers and they give him a quote based on the amount of employee's and what coverage he wants them to have. So after they have this information the insurance company can give them a quote on insurance. After which the employer decides they would like their service and sign a contract.
Now this amount can vary on the type of insurance you want as well as the deductibles and co pays that you pay. For example for prescriptions you pay a percentage & for emergency rooms you pay a percentage of that bill. This is the deductible in which you are responsible for. Now the lower the deductible and co pay the more that insurance is going to cost. You can offset that to some degree by the amount of people you're trying to insure. Now we reach the point where I said I pay roughly $21 a month. You negate to figure in the price that my company pays for the insurance. My $21 is a very small percentage of the total bill per month. I've worked at companies where I've paid close to $200 a month for my health coverage. This is just my portion again not factoring what my employer is paying. I can't be sure on the total amount being paid but the thing is it will be different for every company.
So when you factor my quote you're negating the total cost. You're also overlooking the variables associated with insurance. You can't just come up with a simple figure based on my example alone. Doing so would be a fallacy. That does not speak for every company nor does it take in to consideration all the other companies as well as what they offer and the deductibles.
It's not a simple matter of saying I'll pay around $2.13-$3.39 extra a month to get everyone insured. If that were the case of course I'd be for it. But the cost is going to be much higher than that. Not to mention with government regulation they would be telling me where to go and who I can see. Now with government run health care am I still going to have to pay deductibles and co pays for using the insurance? If its run like this the only way I would even consider being for it is if there were no associated fee's. But I can guarantee that they will still want us to pay deductibles and co pays when we use the insurance.
yes, I am from the UK, unfortunately it's difficult to say exactly what goes out of my wages.
104,000,000,000, between 60,000,000 population, (though ~20% don't work at the moment so only 48,000,000 pay)
104bn / 48m = 2166 per year = 180 per month to be made of employee, and employer (as our employers also pay a part of it).
NI figures look higher on employee wage slips since NI also goes to pay pensions, at least that's how it should work... what actually happens is that we're just taxed twice, income tax, and national insurance all goes into the same general taxation pot. you should watch out for that too...
I don't see how it couldn't boil down to such simple numbers in the US either... scaling the number of the population, and scaling the total cost of the service you'll end up with the same rough ball park figure of £180 (or $287 USD) to be made each month... which is kind of the same as you've said there.
I imagine that if you've had employer subsidised schemes that also pay towards the scheme, but it's cost you $200 a month then we're actually looking at about the same budget figures anyway...
basically, what we can say is that assuming that the number of hospital admissions stays the same, (which it won't, but we'll ignore the social factors for now).
your increased premiums to be made by employee and employer will go up by the same amount in percentage points as the amount of population percentage that currently don't have healthcare...
(so between 10 - 15%) as I pointed out, for you personally, that's an extra 2 - 3 dollars a month.
(the social factors I mentioned above are the people having self delivered home births, the people just not going to the doctors/dentists etc, when it's essentially free for all you can almost guarantee that they will go to the doctors).
for the whole policy, (assume $200 PM) that's a total increase of 20 - 30 dollars per month... (per person) to subsidise the poorer...
the government would, or at least should have massive bargaining powers, and should be able to negotiate a contract relatively cheaply,
you say big business can negotiate a contract, then were talking about a few thousand staff...
what insurance company isn't going to bend over backwards to have 30, million new clients, all state subsidised so there will never be a missed payment etc...
Out of interest, does anyone know what the current total budget expenditure is on current healthcare schemes, (Medicaid etc)... -something that I'm hearing doesn't really work anyway...
how much of that money saved is going to make a dent into the total cost of this new package??
I won't go into the fact that you're paying only $20 because your company is subsidising you, they are probably getting a tax break for that as that'll come from pre-profit margins, possibly counting as though it were some kind of charitable donation. and so are paying less tax.
so your subsidised healthcare may be coming at the cost to the nation at the moment anyway...
yet you would seek to deny that privileged to others?
the reason that I won't go into that too deeply other than saying "this MIGHT be what's happening" is that other than inspecting your books, your companies books, their accounting procedures and their tax returns we'll just never know!