An average western European or Canadian spends $3500 a year, and people live to around 75, thats $262,000 over their lifetime. They ALL get decent healthcare.
EACH typical American lives a few years less, but he or she spends at least twice that per capita- $525,000, Because we should also consider interest, often in reality, far more. Its also obvious that most Americans increasingly don't get good healthcare. :(
Gag clauses and pressure by insurers insure that. But, for the purpose of argument, lets say the average American spends $7000 a year, an old figure, on healthcare. (The real figure is probably getting closer to $10,000/year, we don't know, there is a lag on data.)
If so, COMPLETELY IGNORING THE TIME VALUE OF MONEY (which would make the amount far greater) the typical American spends more than a QUARTER MILLION DOLLARS MORE than the typical Canadian, or Briton on healthcare (they, wholly in taxes, here the government already pays 60% of medical costs)
Most people know that single payer saves a huge amount, but they rarely realize how much, in their own lives that would help them. We've doomed ourselves to each spending $262,000 more than we could, and getting lower quality healthcare because of our falsely alleged obsession with hierarchy (actually ...shhhh!... two thirds of Americans REALLY support Medicare for All)
There's a HUGE amount of PR money being spent confusing people. Six lobbyists for every Congressperson, for example, hundreds of pundits who often misstate the situation, and according the the British media, thousands of paid bloggers here in the US, pushing fake reform. Its all being spent making sure that the American people don't get good healthcare value for their taxes.. like the countries that consistently have been shown to have the best healthcare do.
Right now, they are devoting a LOT of energy trying to make people think they got an acceptable deal.. so they wont fix things, and instead will let them waste another four years, on a plan that is already doomed to cost way too much than most people can afford.
Buying politicians is cheaper than delivering VALUE!
But nothing is ever "done" until its done RIGHT, they say!
Keep that quarter of a million dollar figure in mind, its a rare jolt of reality.
There are hundreds of papers lke the one below.. for the reading on PubMed..
J Health Polit Policy Law. 2009 Aug;34(4):593-615. Single payer as a financing mechanism.
Glied S.
Columbia University, USA. Abstract
This article uses Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) data to assess whether a single-payer health system delivers more care at less cost than do other universal coverage models. Single-payer plans are defined as those that rely on a limited number of revenue sources and systems in which financing is concentrated and private insurance for hospital and medical services is limited. Single-payer advocates argue that this organizational model is best able to reduce administrative costs, control provider payments, and limit the supply of services. This analysis shows that single-payer-like systems do not do a consistently better job of controlling physician incomes but do achieve some administrative cost savings compared to more fragmented systems. Overall, single-payer systems are modestly less costly than their peers and spend a slightly smaller share of the gross domestic product (GDP) on health. There are, however, substantial variations both over time and across countries in the performance of the single-payer-like nations, as well as among the nations in the other universal coverage model categories. Overall, the differences in system performance among the universal coverage OECD countries are very small, while the difference between the performance of any one of these countries and the United States is enormous and persistent.
PMID: 19633224 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]