According to the new CBO report, under single-payer, we could cover ~100% of the population, make medical services free at point of use, and expand benefits — without spending a dollar more. And healthcare providers would still do perfectly well.
If you also add, as we should, universal long term care with no out-of-pocket costs, you'd spend about ~$300 billion more a year on healthcare altogether, they estimate — but we'd have a free-at-point-of-use system with comprehensive benefits for all, including long-term care.
I'll have many more thoughts on this analysis soon, but the bottom line is clear.
Any healthcare reform other than single-payer will either have higher costs or skimpier benefits than single-payer.
(To clarify axis labels, “low cost-sharing” = no copays/deductibles for any health services and low cost-sharing for drugs; “high cost-sharing” is some cost-sharing but less than status quo; “payments” refers to doctor/ hospital payments; LTSS=long term services and supports).
For now, will note CBO makes v. modest assumptions about drug price reductions under single-payer. Here's a graph I made of their assumptions about % change in estimated drug prices under single-payer. Under "high pay" assumptions Pharma revenue ~unchanged accounting for volume
So, how do the numbers actually workout? Well, there's about $400 billion in payer-side administrative savings (Medicare Fee-for-Service, CBO assumes, has ~2% overhead, versus 12% among private insurers). There's also sharp reductions in provider-side administrative spending :
Relatively modest changes in overall hospital funding. Here's "low" cost-sharing, where inpatient and outpatient hospital care is free for everyone. Hospital revenue either rises or falls some depending on rate assumption, but remember small fall could be offset by admin savings
Revenue to physicians and clinicians is higher under every scenario of single-payer than it would be under the status quo, so nothing really here for physicians not to like. In addition, per CBO, they would have a ~50% reduction in time spent on administrative activities.
Apologies for variable quality of graphs and fonts. Also, realized I never linked to the report ! cbo.gov/publication/56…
(Also, to be clear, these are bar graphs I made to present CBO data).
I want to say a word about how utilization increases were modeled, an issue that I've done some research on in recent years with colleagues ... (A bit wonky from here) ...
The CBO report — unlike almost all other Medicare-for-All economic analyses in recent years — assumes supply constraints, e.g. finite doctors/hospital beds. Effectively, they contend that the total amount of healthcare utilized is effectively determined on the supply end...
Colleagues and I have argued similarly, a fact that helps explain why utilization increases after major coverage expansion in high-income nations have been mostly modest.
CBO rightly argues that supply constraints would constrain utilization increases under M4A. Consequently, they argue that even though everyone would be covered, healthcare would be mostly free, & overall use of care would rise, there'd also be an increase in "unmet demand"...
... manifested by increased provider "congestion," waiting times etc. But what this interpretation misses is the fact that much of the overall "demand" for healthcare is supplier-induced — and there is a great deal of wasteful over-provision in this country.
In other words, coverage expansions can lead to less useless care provided. See Glied & Hong, who found that when uninsurance rates for younger people rises, doctors respond by providing Medicare patients more care — but it's not useful healthcare!
So while the CBO is right to assume supply constraints (as few others have) & are also correct in assuming that this translates into less societywide utilization increase, this is likely mediated (at least largely) by less supplier-induced demand rather than more "unmet" demand.
This likely explains why concerns that the passage of Medicare in 1965 would lead to ERs and hospitals overflowing with patients never happened. Actually, there's no evidence I'm aware of that Medicare led to more unmet demand for those < 65 year or more provider congestion...
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Pfizer's EPIC-SR study is (finally) published (what took this so long?).
1: Primary finding: No benefit from Paxlovid on symptom alleviation among vaccinated or unvaccinated people.
2: Not a significant difference, but 0.8% of those who got paxlovid and 1.6% of those who got placebo had a COVID-19 hospitalization or death from any cause. Underpowered for this outcome & not really high-risk group (e.g. a single death from any cause among 1,288 participants).
Given this, should not extrapolate to truly high-risk patients, e.g. an octogenarian with severe emphysema.
UK-based PANORAMIC study, which enrolled almost 30,000 people may have something more to say about effects for truly high-risk people. But no idea when.
First, to be clear, there is zero question that social goods like housing are critically important for health, usually more than medical care — it is an urgent social and political prerogative to realize them.
That's not what's up for question to my mind.
2/X
What's up for question is instead three-fold: (1) the role of medical institutions in providing access to these goods; (2) whether Medicaid should be the funding source; (3) the likelihood that there will be "returns on investment" in form of reduced medical spending.
3/X
As a general principle, if the reproductive number largely determines the share of a population that will be infected before a respiratory viral wave ends, then only those behavioral/interventional changes that permanently change the reproductive number will reduce ...
the share of the population infected in a wave.
So the term "wave" can be misleading in this context because it suggests that waves eventually "pass through" a population with time: instead, they (typically) end because of the rise in population immunity.
In this context, reducing social contacts / reproductive number would be expected to only reduce the number of infections if such changes are permanent. For those seriously interested in altering respiratory viral epidemiology this reality needs to be honestly acknowledged,
We modeled health outcomes from three 2022 Supreme Court Decisions with major ramifications for health, finding that they could lead to nearly 3,000 deaths over a decade and many other adverse health outcomes.
> NFIB v. OSHA, which voided COVID-19 workplace protections
> NYS Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, which invalidated state laws restricing hand-gun carry
> Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade
Our research group brought to together experts on firearm injuries, abortion policy, and COVID-19 from multiple institutions, including David Himmelstein, Samuel Dickman, Caitlin Myers, David Hemenway, Danny McCormack, and @swoolhandler.
People made giant sacrifices during the pandemic to reduce viral spread, including many who did it not for themselves but for others — like barely seeing family and friends for months or even years on end.
Life is short: this was sacrifice, for a good end.
People who say: "we never really had lockdowns in the US" are discounting the massive personal sacrifices that people made, and that bothers me.
Sacrifice isn't something bad: rather, it is something painful but worthwhile.
There is bizarre dichotomy now in the COVID discourse that, on the one side, seems to deny that policies were often socially painful, and on the other side, to deny that any of it was worthwhile.
During the heated debate over the approach to COVID-19 vaccine prioritization, some worried that age-based prioritization would be inequitable — and consequently embraced an approach that prioritized essential workers. I sympathized with that view, but worried that it ...
... would save less lives, and so argued for an age-based scheme along with other measures, e.g. targeted outreach programs to improve delivery to disadvantaged communities, along with bolstered UI, M4A, etc.
But it was a difficult question — was there a tradeoff between lives saved & equity? This study suggests that there wasn't, at least when comparing these two strategies — far from it, with large benefits for all groups from one of the two approaches.