That’s over twenty years. So $100B/year. There are 0.3B of us. So that’s $3000 per person per year. That’s about what my employer pays for a BCBS elite HD-HSA PPO for my group of relatively young, affluent, healthy tech workers in Boston.
It doesn’t come close to covering all of it.
There are 3M nurses and 1M doctors in the US. That $100B/yr could pay each $25k in salary, and cover no equipment.
Let’s say we want to pay nurses $150k and doctors $250k, good middle class salaries comparable to tech incomes. You need $700B per year.
You have to think beyond the accounting. Think of the opportunity cost.
Many people stay at their jobs because of healthcare. Period. Either they don't want to lose it, or don't want to lose some aspect of it. How many startups aren't started? How many dreams aren't filled? How much value isn't created?
The 100B/year would be as well as current health spending, not instead of it.
What would the additional costs of universal health care be, and would 100B/year cover it? Currently about 27m Americans do not have health insurance. 100B would yield about $3,700 per person which is probably about enough to do it.
> Let’s say we want to pay nurses $150k and doctors $250k, good middle class salaries comparable to tech incomes.
Regardless of the rest of the logic, those are not middle class salaries. They aren't even middle class household (i.e. 2x earners) incomes in almost all of the country.
Tech salaries are a terrible benchmark for a lot or reasons, but those are well above average tech salaries also.
The US pays more per citizen for healthcare than any
civilized country in the world, and gets poorer outcomes.
There is a LOT of room for lowering your costs and improving your outcomes when you’re ready to redesign it. But yeah, if you just try to duct tape over a crack here, and bolt a new feature on there, nothing seems to work.
The poorer outcomes aren't due to the quality of US healthcare but differences in the people of the US. The US is bigger than most countries so people need to drive more and thus are more likely to get into car accidents. The opioid crisis has caused the US life expectancy to decrease but that has nothing to do with the quality of hospitals. Better hospitals and medicine don't prevent people exercising less, eating more fast food, etc.
It doesn’t come close to covering all of it.
There are 3M nurses and 1M doctors in the US. That $100B/yr could pay each $25k in salary, and cover no equipment.
Let’s say we want to pay nurses $150k and doctors $250k, good middle class salaries comparable to tech incomes. You need $700B per year.
That’s not impossible to find at https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/US_fed_spending_pie_cha..., and I think we should—but it’s not obvious how to do so or what to sacrifice.
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