Universal healthcare would be a great boon for employers, as then they would no longer have to worry about providing and paying for it as part of employee compensation.
While a government-run universal care program doesn’t thrill me, I find the current employer-based system to be borderline immoral.
The more I deal with the system the more it strikes me as a corrupt, crony deal to make workers more dependent on their employer, depress wages, and drive up medical industry profits.
Another possibility is a cap on drug profits declining with drug age. This will allow enough market to avoid having to guess production costs in advance and set them in stone. The drawback is incentives to efficiency. Perhaps a mixture of price cap and profit cap would hit the sweet spot.
Unemployed people doing gofundme’s for insulin...
It's goddamn criminal.
[edit: it's also 'fun' to think how much harder it would have been to identify the bad charges prior to the ACA's explanation of benefits requirements.]
In France, if you want to spend 120k euros on an employee, you'd pay about 40k towards healthcare and the national retirement plan (and a few other things). The employee gets paid 80k, and then pays income tax on that. Income tax is quite lower than in the US though. All in all, my experience has been that the taxation levels in France are comparable to what you'd pay if you lived in New York City.
In us, federal reaches to 36% or so on highest bracket, and about 10% on states like california. I dont know how much is average, however.
Income tax on the other hand is something the employee will have to figure out himself, because he may have other income streams.
This keeps the work where there is expertise as much as possible.
Of course there are indirect/externalized cost like the the health worker education system, potentially having hospitals and their equippment set up not to maximize profit but for coverage in the population etc. which this patient now may be freeloading on.
There is another perspective though if you consider free movement of labor in the EU (and to some extent globally for highly educated individuals) and the comparatively low salaries for medical professionals in Croatia and other cost-saving medical travel destinations (Hungary, Poland, Thailand, Mexico and others). If the doctors in the country can make an attractive buck on the side doing private practice then this alleviates the pressure to some extent. Especially if it allows the more senior doctors to stay in country and thus continue to train the next generation in med schools and the facilities.
Now I don't have a source to back it up but my feeling tells me that it is a net-positive activity for the destination countries. Depending on the scale of business, the foreign money might buy a new machine that other patients can use as well or quality improvements via the international certifications and accreditations.
That is not guarantee against potentially canibalising the local social system and could in worst cases lead to a two-class system so i suppose an adequate system to regulate access and subsidize for social fairness is in place where private and public seem equally "healthy".
Full disclosure: I work in tech at https://www.medigo.com We help facilitate global medical travel and publish prices to bring the best of capitalism to work in an ethical manner. We also have our own critical illness insurance for global treatment available for employers.