See 37... privatization of medicare is a fools errand IMHO... not only from a political standpoint but from a practical reality standpoint. The industry is far more complex than any of these let the private industry solve it types understand... For good or bad.. .and these are some of the most vulnerable people in our population who are needing the most from the health care system.
Understand, 80% of what you spend on health care in your ENTIRE LIFE.. on average is spent during the last 2 years of your life. Private industry insurance, has no clue how to handle pooling for that reality... because guess what? Thanks to medicare they don’t worry about that reality... because if you are over 65 you are on medicare... expenditures related to you are not something their cost pools need to deal with... so their pooling is devoid of roughly 80% of the overall cost of care for individuals.
Could they do it? Perhaps, but it will require complete repooling and will raise EVERYONE’S rates to cover it.. it would also, due to the movement of demographics from more younger people and less as the age group goes up... like a pyramid which made up most of human history... now is more of a column where the number of people at each age group alive today is closer to the same, and only int eh 70s and 80s does the group size really tail off...
This isn’t a simple problem, and its not something you can toss and private industry and hope for the best... it will wind up with the same kind of crap that went on with ITT and others.. where folks will just defraud the government and leave these seniors with squat.
This isn’t a simple or easy problem, not even close, and anyone just claiming let the market deal with it is flippant and ignorant.
I am open to private industry ideas, but flippant just let the market take care of it? Not going to happen folks... whether you like it or not ideologically.
Yes, I used to have health insurance companies as clients, and their whole mindset is to have the government pay them directly for seniors’ health insurance plans. They don’t want to deal with individual payers at the senior level unless they’re buying individual supplemental plans.
No one is going to change the health insurers’ minds about that. It’s impossible.
So if that’s the case, we have to figure out how to fund senior health plans. The GOP and the Democrats thought the best way to do that was with mass immigration — just get more people into the country and paying into the system. This is after stagnant and reduced population growth designed by statists (all their policies are centered around entropy).
The answer is to get more money flowing into the coffers. I can’t think of any other better way than with pro-American economic growth. Wages must rise. Jobs must be created.
Instead of importing foreign cars manufactured overseas, the cars should be manufactured here using American labor. That’s the new globalism for the free market crowd. Make stuff where you sell it.