Medicare is not single-payer. With Medicare, you still have to pay for medical care
I'm pretty sure most of the the pollywogs in the pond don't know there is a monthly fee for PART B recipients. Both my wife and I are now paying and it amounts to more that our regular health insurance payment used to be.
What happens under Medicare, if you went to it as the final solution...you’d basically tell hospitals/clinics that X-care will cost this much, and you just won’t get an incentive to provide a full-service hospital/clinic.
In a matter of five years, you’d notice that they would start to pick and choose what services they provide. I would take a guess that 20 to 50 percent of hospitals would downsize or just shutdown. If you did have a serious accident, you’d have to depend on a chopper pick-up and probably a sixty-minute ride to hospital off in the distance from your rural location.
Course, the positive is that the cost rate would drop...as you started to get less and less care.
One can also buy up to a better grade of service, either through Medicare Advantage, supplemental coverage, or out of pocket payments.
This is not possible under single-payer systems such as Medicaid.
Yep.
Not only that you pre-pay for Medicare even if you never live long enough to use it.
I have to send a check for 3.8% net of everything I earn to prepay for Medicare.
And when you turn 65 and are forced into Medicare you will be paying between two and five hundred dollars a month for your required "supplemental" insurance.
It’s single payer from the patient’s point of view.
And Medicare is heavily subsidized by the government. I once worked as a consultant to a Medicare Managed Care plan. They were charging the patient anywhere from 0 to $120 a month depending on what the plan covered. But they were getting $1000 a month per patient from the government.
There’s many reasons not to do this, but if they do, I hope they allow supplemental plans for things that Medicare doesn’t cover.
Still pie in the sky and circling around the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
Personal health is a personal responsibility, first, last and always. Medical services shall always remain scarce, and must be applied to the greatest needs first.
Since some 95% of personal woe is in some way self-induced, this may be a very good way to undertake REAL medical care reform. Stop inducing woes upon yourself. There already are a multitude of instruction manuals for the feeding, grooming, caring for and maintaining the human body, and innumerable rules about which kinds of behavior to avoid, that may lead to sometimes intense medical care needs.
Requiring that the participant in any government medical payment scheme either prove a real contractual right to this care (as VA for service-connected disorders), or as a participant in other employment or retirement plans, to even have assistance in payment of medical bills, should also be putting up some fraction of their own resources for the retention of medical service. The idea is to take this out of the realm of “welfare”, and puts it in the category of shared responsibility. Essentially, rationing services by pricing, by making it incumbent on the consumer of medical services to scrutinize just how much the services are REALLY needed.
Right. Medicare pays 80 percent. You pay the rest yourself or pay big bucks for a supplement.
Medicare is not single-payer. With Medicare, you still have to pay for medical care..
That is true!