| Hmm. 3rd paragraph they break it down some -- 15 Trillion for health care over 10 years, or averaging 1.5 Trillion per year. There were ~151 million Americans in the labor force and employed last month[1]. If they're the folks that will be paying, then it's something like $9,934 per year in taxes that need to be collected per tax payer, to support the (in 2013) roughly 316 million population[2] of the US with an additional roughly $4,747 in government spending. (I'm using 2016 employment numbers because 2013 we were still recovering from the recession, unemployment was much higher, and it's better to play with conservative estimates.) WHO[3] has 2013 numbers indicating Government spend on healthcare at $4,307 per capita, and total spend (govt. + private) at $9,146. With 2013 numbers, we'd be bumping the public spending on health care to $9,054 per capita. To note, in 2013, of the US private spending, $3,063 out of $4,839 is on insurance plans. The remaining $1,776 is the per capita out of pocket cost (again, for 2013). I don't think I know of any single-payer systems around the world that covers all costs. UK, Germany, Sweden [3-5] all have expansive single-payer systems established. The out of pocket is indeed lower for these -- a few hundred to $700 ish per capita vs our $1,700. Those programs, if you have a gander, are more substantial for the massively lower government spend per capita on healthcare overall. If we're suddenly looking at $9k per capita govt spend, vs the 3-5 for these other states, I'm not sure that we've yet fixed something. The selling point of the Bernie concept must be putting this initially more-expensive insurance plan in place ($3,xxx vs $4,747) with the goal that sometime after 10 years we'll have seen enough price suppression that our out-of-pocket goes down enough to break even, or start to reduce total costs, over the private-only market. 10 years is a really long time. And adding $9,900 / year on average to each taxpayer seems like a big number. [1]: http://www.dlt.ri.gov/lmi/laus/us/usadj.htm [2]: http://www.worldpopulationstatistics.com/us-population-2013/ [3]: http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.country.country-USA?lang=e... [4]: http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.country.country-GBR?lang=e... [5]: http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.country.country-DEU?lang=e... [6]: http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.country.country-SWE?lang=e... |