The US healthcare system is non-functional for a month: what happens?
Hospitals and providers start running into cash flow problems and begin having difficulties providing service.
Fraud skyrockets because everything is getting blanket-approved because none of the data used for verification is available.
And about a month after that, people start dying from lack of care, after the last financial reserves of the system are exhausted.
Because that's the path the system was on when Change went down for several weeks, only averted by HHS/CMS saying 'Here's money, just do procedures, we'll worry about it later.'
You say this as if people aren't already dying of lack of care. And it's already disintegrating. Check back up in your estimated month as the realities of ACA subsidy drops start to kick in.
Well you see it would free up a huge amount of money that employers are currently paying to insurers. If you take that money (by raising the Medicare premium on employees), plus the existing medicaid budget, existing medicare tax and payroll tax contributions America's healthcare system would receive over 40% more money to cover care per capita than the next leading contestant. Almost 2X the OECD average. In PPP dollars no less.
"But where would the money come from" is one of the wildest questions to ask about a system that already costs double the average. I'd say, give or take, the same place its coming from now, but like, less.
I pay $2k a month through work for a plan. I could pay that plus the payroll deduction plus the pittance my employer kicks in. I’d make that trade all day every day.
Estimates of health insurance fraud is also around $30 billion, so same order of magnitude, and considering the margins of error and the fact that they are estimates, by definition, it makes it hard to say public health insurance is more fraud ridden then private. Plus due to the inherent differences there are probably differing avenues of research and estimating possible between private and public insurance, and heck whole different forms of draining money that might affect ease of uncovering the level of fraud between private and public, which would make it have an even larger margin of error.