LogFAQs > #925422112

One of the primary benefits to true socialized healthcare is that paying into it will truly be based on income/wealth. That is, the top 1% will pay for about 50% of the total national healthcare costs, the next 20% will pay for about 40%, the next 30% will pay about 10%, and the bottom 50% pays nothing. Numbers are rough and off the top of my head for what percentage of income taxes are paid by different income groups.

If it's opt-in, obviously you don't get this structure. There is no way the public option is going to be attractive for a top 1%er if it's going to cost them 50x private insurance. So the only way the public option would be viable at all would be to make it similar in structure to private insurance - which means it won't be socialized healthcare where people pay in according to their ability to pay.

And you lose a lot of the benefits of change. Not all, because the US healthcare system is extraordinarily inefficient, where we have a loss of maybe 6% of GDP, or 60% of the prevailing cost of healthcare in first world countries, in transaction costs involved in dealing with middlemen. But you won't get close to the full benefit of socialized medicine either.
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September 1, 2003; November 4, 2007; September 2, 2013
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