Republican Healthcare Plan

I agree that you have better outcomes for those people whose insurance will cover the higher tech. And while you are all taking like 10 prescriptions a year, your life expectancy averages out to a little under 76 for men, 81 for women. This puts you up there with Chile and China.The UK is at a little under 78 for men and 82 for women. (List of countries by life expectancy - Wikipedia)I'd argue there is a suggestion here that the spending isn't benefiting the health of the people, but the pockets of the corporations. Well I have three chronic conditions all of which can escalate to life threatening quickly, and have done for a long time.My annual insurance cost is approximately $2,500, you can now do a reverse calculation to roughly infer my salary assuming I am honest... I pay an additional $350 for my year's supply of medicine (two of them are prohibitively expensive to buy) . That's my entire medical bill for all non dental work (I pay privately for dental, but regularly utilize the discounted/free rates of the NHS for routine stuff). I get free eye tests, discounts on glasses and a host of other things. I've had to go to the hospital for emergency care about half a dozen times in the last 5 years and this has cost me an additional $0. My employer contributes $2,700 a year into the kitty. I believe USA citizens pay somewhere closer to $8-9K a year on average?The best part is that this deduction comes out of my wage, so I don't even 'feel' like I'm paying for it. It's a cost that has always been there for me.When I joined EvC my insurance costs were about $600 (present day) a year, because I was earning much less and I didn't have any prescription costs. Well, no. Otherwise Medicare would decide 0 and the doctors would decide infinite. In both cases the hospital administration charges as much as it can and Medicare and the private insurance companies try to pay as little as they can. Thus market forces are determining price. Medicare has the numbers which gives it a negotiating edge. I believe private insurance agrees to pay for flashy operations and treatments that only marginally improve the patients chances and use agreements with drug companies to promise to give drug companies volume in exchange for price as part of their tools. With the NHS, young healthy people that feel immortal still contribute, and if they have high income they are contributing a lot (On 120,000 a year they'd be a healthy person paying about 15,000 a year for national health insurance, their employer would pay about 5700). The numbers are even bigger, the risk even more distributed. Law of large numbers, risk pooling, means tested...This is the optimal solution if you care about people, as it means (the) people's exposure to financial risk is lower allowing more stability and confidence for the future.If you are interested in making it profitable, your system is much better. Your doctors get paid twice as much as ours, for example (it varies but about $70-90K sounds about right for UK doctor salary) which is nice for them. Also, insurance companies make a wonderful little profit. I believe they are even permitted to make an underwriting profit? In the Republican plan, they'd be able to pick their optimal coverage to maximise profit by selectively denying and gouging people of certain groups (aka pay or die).Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

Exactly. It's not the doctor deciding the price. It's not Medicare deciding the price. There are other elements to the equation. Right, but if all the providers don't want in, Medicare gets no service. So actually it is not unilateral. Would you believe that the government actually discusses pricing with their suppliers? That they come to an agreement with the major suppliers as to a fair price and then can say 'like it or lump it' to the rest of the suppliers. This is the negotiation power that numbers gives them. If it was universal, the negotiation is at its most efficient. A company that can afford to pay someone 120K a year has to pay the additional kicker so the kitty gets a nice bump from the top 10 percent of earners, but the calculator I was using may have crapped out because it ignored some caps for simplicity. Here's an approximate breakdown assuming no tax cleverness but taking into account the caps and ignoring employer contribution {which in the case of the high earner, is about 15K I think}:Gross Wage 120,000
Taxable Wage 119,400
Tax Paid 41,403
Tax Free Allowance 600
National Insurance 5,671
Take-home pay 72,926Compared to the average wage:Gross Wage 25,000
Taxable Wage 14,400
Tax Paid 2,880
Tax Free Allowance 10,600
National Insurance 2,033
Take-home pay 20,087The wealthy pay over the odds and can afford to do so. The poor pay nothing or close to it:Gross Wage 12,000
Taxable Wage 1,400
Tax Paid 280
Tax Free Allowance 10,600
National Insurance 473
Take-home pay 11,247

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Note: The national insurance also pays into other benefits such as the State Pension, unemployment and so on.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

Well no, its complicated and I'm trying to give you the gist without delving into annoying taxcodes too heavily. Unfortunately you seem to be looking at an extreme case and making unusual conclusions so I'm going to try and be as clear as possible now. The National Insurance is much like social security + medicare, some of that goes towards healthcare specifically but some of the main income tax does as well. I believe someone earning $150,000 a year will be paying about $20,000 towards Social Security and Medicare (with 50% of that paid by the employer and 50% by the employee). So even here, it should be clear that the individual has better direct benefits with the UK distribution. $10,000 in the US vs $7000 in the UK for the social security and medicare stuff.A person earning 120,000 a year (say, the Prime Minister or a General are the kinds of people we are talking about) would, if they weren't exempt which I'm sure they are in all sorts of ways, pay 8,000 for the NHS part of their contribution including contribution from income tax. That's basically their healthcare costs, though I'm sure they'd also pay for private medical insurance on that salary.The much more common, man on the street, earning 25,000 when it's broken down pays about 1,000 for the NHSA fairly poor person (minimum wage, near full time) earning 12,000 a year pays 164 for their healthcare.Take Action - ONE It is. Very few people earn 120,000/year salaries as an employee.
The overwhelming majority pay considerably less.