A lot to respond to here.
We still have health insurers up here. We are not talking about elliminating health insurance, rather, provide a baseline insurance for everyone.
I am covered by universal healthcare, but I still have private insurance on top.
Burnitdown wasn't talking about providing a baseline, he said we should "replace health insurance" and that is what I was responding to. I believe in universal healthcare and I think that everyone has a right to coverage. My personal opinion is that we should move to the German model. I think it fits best with our current system and provides better coverage. I mainly just disagree with the notion that replacing health insurance solves all our issues. Insurers do a lot of good when it comes to cost control and the cost of care is the biggest issue we have.
He didn't say remove it, he said replace it. The problem with insurance is that they are attempting to lower costs for themselves and care nothing at all if the costs are lower for the patient or not, in fact since more and more hospitals and clinics are now owned by those same insurance companies they are not interested in keeping costs down for the patient at all, just in mitigating how much of that cost they pay.
What we want is a replacement for the insurance company that is actually working on our behalf to keep prices down instead of a profit driven motive that only works for me incidentally. There is several ways to do this, but it seems that socialized healthcare is the way most other places have found to work so we should really pay attention to the work they already did in this area.
The bolded part is demonstrably not true. We currently have some really good regulation in place that puts a floor on the medical loss ratio for insurance. This literally means that if costs decrease they are required to be passed on to the insureds. They care about lower costs because there is still some competition with regards to selling their plans. Most people (unfortunately not all) do have multiple choices and price is the biggest factor when picking a plan. They pinch pennies and deny coverage because it effects how much they have to charge and if they have to charge more they will lose volume and hence total profits. It's a fairly symbiotic relationship on a macro level, it's the micro level where problems occur because of coverages being denied.
Unless we are willing to socialize the whole system, which most people are against, the hospitals/providers/pharma/device will all be run by people who want profits. If you say that insurance companies aren't allowed to own providers, someone else is still going to own them and want the same profits. On the surface level I wouldn't be terribly opposed to some legislation that prevented insurers from owning hospitals due to conflict of interest, but that is a very different thing then just saying get rid of them entirely.
You are of course right about this. Its not simple, it is very complicated.
The reason why removing insurance from the program may reduce rates is that every doctors office and hospital won't need to have a dozen people dedicated to filing claims, working on prior auths, doing collections, or figuring out third party processing/billing standards for a bunch of different plans. Have you ever seen the NDCPD D.0 handbook, its like 500 pages, and that is just for pharmacy third party billing. With a single payer, you will automatically remove SOME complexity.
One of the other elements of "saving" with universal coverage is simply that more people will get preventative care, which usually costs a LOT less than getting the care after something goes wrong.
Hospital billing systems are absolutely atrocious, I completely agree with you. It would add some efficiency to the system if they only had to deal with one provider and that is a great argument for a single payer system. I also know that any time there has been talk of standardizing hospital systems more so that there has been a ton of push back from the hospitals themselves. Sometimes they don't want to standardize data processes because it would require a lot of money up front even though it would save money in the long run, other times they don't want a universal data standard because they would have less control over keeping their data proprietary.
We have a long way to go with fixing our healthcare system and I didn't mean to single you out. I mainly just try to push back anytime I think someone is saying there is an easy fix, just do "x", and that doesn't appear to be the case with you.