« One more stab at the apple | Main | Set your Tivos . . . » Good question24 Aug 2007 12:08 pm Medpundit asks: Why do people think that a single-payer system would be any better than Medicare or Medicaid? The way things work now, Medicare gets the gold (more political clout in the over-65 population) and Medicaid gets the shaft (absolutely no political clout in that population). TrackBackTrackBack URL for this entry: Comments (10)
I don't understand Medpundit's question. A single-payer system is Medicare extended to all age groups. It doesn't have to be "better" than Medicare. "As good as" would suit me just fine. 
Health care is about "clout"? I note that the Medpundit post you link to is a comment on something from The New Republic. Oy. Talk about suspect sources. The entire Medpundit post is a litany of scare-words and strawmen.
"Health care is about "clout"?" Government entitlement progams are all about clout.
I like Stan's comment...it's realistic. I hope people aren't expecting to get a bunch of cost savings out of single payer. I don't think Medicare generates great cost savings. In fact I expect Medicare exacerbates some problems caused by badly set prices, and this would be even worse if Medicare was bigger. But it probably wouldn't be a disaster, just like health care under Medicare isn't really a disaster, it's just expensive and not terribly efficient, but covers everyone.
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Wouldn't the logical expectation be that a single payer system would be somewhere in between -- i.e., less generously funded than Medicare but better funded than Medicaid?
(That probably isn't exactly right. It seems likely that within a single-payer system, seniors would still push for more coverage and higher reimbursement rates for medical services disproportionately used by seniors. It's probably also likely that services used disproportionately by the upper and upper-middle classes (say, infertility treatments) would be more generously funded than services used disproportionately by the poor (insert your own example).)
Posted by alkali | August 24, 2007 12:16 PM