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Amazon's Push Into Healthcare Just Cost the Industry $30 Billion In Market Cap (qz.com)
Today, Amazon, along with Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan, announced a plan to launch an independent company that will offer healthcare services to the companies' employees at a lower cost. The venture, which will be managed by executives from the firms, will be run more like a non-profit, than a for-profit entity. Even though the plans are vague, the news caused the market value of 10 large, listed health insurance and pharmacy stocks to drop by a combined $30 billion in the first two hours of trading. Quartz reports: "The healthcare system is complex, and we enter into this challenge open-eyed about the degree of difficulty," said Amazon's Jeff Bezos in a statement. "Hard as it might be, reducing healthcare's burden on the economy while improving outcomes for employees and their families would be worth the effort. Success is going to require talented experts, a beginner's mind, and a long-term orientation." Warren Buffett, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, likened America's mushrooming healthcare costs to "a hungry tapeworm on the American economy." How the venture will provide less pricy healthcare to the 1.2 million employees of the participating companies isn't yet clear. The new company will leverage "technology solutions" that provide "simplified, high-quality and transparent healthcare at a reasonable cost." Not much else, including the name of the company, is known.
The entire selling point of going with Romneycare was to preserve the Democrat's control of Congress. It didn't work, but that was the real argument. Obama and the Democrats would rather stay in power than give us decent healthcare.
America has higher prices mostly because we pay for most of the world's medical research. Sure, there's some overhead from insurance companies (mostly from the lack of standardized claims reporting - the government should fix that), but that's only one factor. Higher drug prices (in the private sector) is a big part of that: it pays to acquire the pharma startups that do the actual research (much like the big tech companies rarely invent anything, but they buy tech startups for crazy amounts, which in turn funds most of the actual advances in our field).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
So if as you state, no other country had their health care costs cut in half (or even decreased) when they switched to single-payer, then you've pretty conclusively proven empirically that there is no reason to think your original assertion that health care costs would be cut in half if the U.S. switched to single-payer is true. Thanks for confirming that for us.
If you want to discuss why the U.S. spends more on health care than other countries, you'll want to come up with something which explains why the U.S. spends more on just about everything than other countries. Or alternately, what are the things driving up health care costs in the United States. Guess what? Laws and regulations are the largest component of why health care is expensive in the U.S. (And please don't cite people who were completely wrong about what Obamacare would do to costs to try and argue otherwise, they've already discredited themselves on the subject.)
Trying to show causation between having a single-payer system and lower costs requires you to actually show empirical evidence that it was single-payer which makes a difference. Otherwise, you might as well claim that countries without as many paved roads causes health spending to be lower, which happens to be a true correlation, but doesn't mean much in terms of causation.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.