Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by john_moscow 1907 days ago
The unspoken thing is that current Medicare is only sustainable because the hospitals are allowed to recover the costs by charging whatever they can get away with to uncovered people.

If everyone is covered, quite a lot of money will have to come from elsewhere and it's not like seriously raising taxes to source it would get very popular.

2 comments

US healthcare spending is already far higher than anywhere else in the world. It's not a "quantity" problem, it's an "allocation" problem. Too much is allocated to various middlemen for profit, and generally too much is wasted on care that does not produce good returns in terms of quality-adjusted years-of-life. For example, too much is spent on the elderly and sick, and not enough on maintaining the healthy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...

US healthcare is totally overpriced. I don’t believe for a single second that they are losing money on Medicare. Maybe in some areas but not on average.