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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

Could it?

> https://www.thebalance.com/u-s-federal-budget-breakdown-3305...

Total Revenue is $4T, Total Spending is $6T, and

> Social Security will be the biggest expense, budgeted at $1.196 trillion. It's followed by Medicare at $766 billion and Medicaid at $571 billion.

That is $1.35T spent on healthcare just for old people (over 65) and poor people. And it is not even the whole amount, since most 65+ people still have to buy insurance. Even if you cut out the 5% profit margins of managed care organizations, or even 15% assuming their function is wholly unnecessary, it still seems unlikely universal health can be offered without increasing tax revenues.

In 2019, total healthcare spend for all of US was $3.9T.

https://www.cms.gov/files/document/highlights.pdf

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> That is $1.35T spent on healthcare just for old people (over 65) and poor people.

Aged, blind, disabled, and poor, plus less poor children and pregnant women.

And notably, many of those categories have disproportionately high medical costs.

True, but somehow still only $1.35T out of $4T total healthcare spending.

The original claim by smus was that the US could pay for all healthcare, presumably without increasing taxes. I find that hard to agree with. Even if we assume we can cut 25% overhead from the $4T total, the US would still need to come up with $1.5T+ to meet $3T total healthcare spending.

I do not see it happening without increasing taxes. Which may not make any effective difference other than to redudant employees of managed care organizations (MCOs) who get laid off, because presumably the premiums currently getting paid to the MCOs simply get collected as taxes.

Yeah, I don't have a strong opinion on the original claim. I don't think it's clear that it's impossible to fund the kind of universal healthcare we'd want without raising taxes but I do think that's likely. I think it's probably "easy" (in terms of having the money available in theory, not politically) to fund universal healthcare at the level we'd want while raising taxes on each individual by less than they were paying for private care. But these are guesses.

> True, but somehow still only $1.35T out of $4T total healthcare spending.

The federal share is not the whole public cost; Medicaid is a state/federal cost sharing program.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/u-s-spends-public-money-hea...

We already spend more per Capita than countries with socialized medicine, so it stands to reason we should be able to socialize our medicine with a reasonable increase in expenditure on health care.

That extra money doesn't need to come from raising taxes. It can come from our incredibly bloated "defense" budget

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