Category: Single-Payer/Medicare-for-All

The Most Rapid Change in Family Structure in Human History

Posted on by John C. Goodman

This is David Brooks:

If you want to summarize the changes in family structure over the past century, the truest thing to say is this: We’ve made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. We’ve made life better for adults but worse for children. We’ve moved from big, interconnected, and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families (a married couple and their children), which give the most privileged people in society room to maximize their talents and expand their options. The shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor.

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Why the Markup on a $50,000 Knee Surgery is 500%

Posted on by Devon Herrick

Few hospitals in the United States have any idea what their costs are to perform various surgeries. The second most common surgery in U.S. hospitals after those related to childbirth is knee replacement. The price is more than $50,000 at Gundersen Health System’s hospital in La Crosse, Wisconsin.  The facility has been systematically raising the price of knee surgery about 3% every year. None of administrators had any idea how much was profit and how much was the cost of nursing care, labor, overhead, supplies, etc. Gundersen, like most U.S. hospitals, didn’t know the cost because they do not face still competition and are not competing on price. Unlike most U.S. hospitals, however, Gundersen set out to find out its cost.

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The Worst of Obamacare

Posted on by John C. Goodman

Ever since Obamacare became law, my colleagues and I have been writing about a race to the bottom in the exchanges – where health plans try to attract the healthy and avoid the sick. The result: people with serious health problems are being denied access to the doctors and hospitals they desperately need.

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New CBO Report on Single Payer Health Plan

Posted on by John C. Goodman

Chris Jacobs writes:

The report makes for bracing reading. Funding an increase in spending equal to 10 percent of GDP—the cost of the most robust single-payer option—by an increase in labor taxes alone would require the average tax rate paid on labor income to more than double, from 17.7 percent in 2020 to 38.4 percent in 2030. Conversely, using a progressive income tax that applies to both labor and capital would triple capital gains average rates, from 15. 4 percent in 2020 to 45.4 percent in 2030.

As for the economic effects, this is from the CBO’s previous report:

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