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TopicBiden's health care plan is pretty good imho
s0nicfan
07/15/19 6:30:58 PM
#47:


Balrog0 posted...
s0nicfan posted...
Not if you're also interested in controlling cost as well as coverage.


No, most of those are utterly irrelevant either way. Interstate insurance sales are already legal, I'm pretty sure because of the ACA. And there are several states that allow people to purchase across state lines already. But no one takes advantage of it because there are structural issues with forming provider networks rather than legal ones. I only skimmed this, but it seems like a good brief: https://nashp.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Insurance-Across-State-Lines.pdf

Malpractice suits are a very small part of the cost of health care, and it depends on where you get your coverage. Certain kinds of tort reform reduce premiums by 1-2%, but only for PPOs rather than HMOs. More people are covered in PPOs, true, but that's pretty small potatoes regardless. https://www.nber.org/papers/w15371.pdf

I'm not against listing prices for hospitals, but I think it misunderstands the problem with health care, at least if you mean consumer-facing prices. Hospitals, like insurers, have structural advantages and disadvantages that drive a lot of the costs. Hospitals with monopolies can negotiate higher reimbursement rates from insurance providers. Price shopping matters, but only once you get people covered, otherwise they don't have the leverage to negotiate lower prices. That's what insurance is for, almost literally.

An attempt to standardize medicine prices is called single-payer. What other mechanism do you see to address that?


To address your last point first, Biden's plan which allows you to purchase medicine from overseas is one way to do it.

To speak more generally to everything else, my shortlist absent one or two items is primarily about boosting competition. It's certainly not going to fix everything, but the idea is to provide people with enough options to drive down price. I'm generally of the opinion that we haven't done nearly enough to try and fix our current system in meaningful ways to have gotten to the point that we are talking what is essentially a rewrite of healthcare rather than reform.

I'm sure there are other things you could mention that would also achieve this, and I'm not necessarily against any of those.
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