Opinion | 'Medicare for All' Could Kill Two Million Jobs, and That's O.K. - The New Yor... - 0 views
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Any significant reform would require major realignment of the health care sector, which is now the biggest employer in at least a dozen states. Most hospitals and specialists would probably lose money. Some, like the middlemen who negotiate drug prices, could be eliminated. That would mean job losses in the millions.
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the point is to streamline for patients a Kafka-esque health care system that makes money for industry through irrational practices. After all, shouldn’t the primary goal of a health care system be delivering efficient care at a reasonable price
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In 2012, the Harvard economists Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra warned against “treating the health care system like a (wildly inefficient) jobs program.” They were rightly worried that the health care system was the primary engine of recovery from the Great Recession
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Change could come in many guises: for example, some form of Medicare expansion, government negotiations on drug prices or enhancing the power of the Affordable Care Act. The more fundamental the reform, the more severe the economic effect.
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The first casualties of a Medicare for all plan, said Kevin Schulman, a physician-economist at Stanford, would be the “intermediaries that add to cost, not quality.” For example, the armies of administrators, coders, billers and claims negotiators who make good middle-class salaries and have often spent years in school learning these skills.
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Stanford researchers estimate that 5,000 community hospitals would lose more than $151 billion under a Medicare for all plan; that would translate into the loss of 860,000 to 1.5 million jobs. A Navigant study found that a typical midsize, nonprofit hospital system would have a net revenue loss of 22 percent.
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Medicare for all would result in job losses (mostly among administrators) “somewhere in the range of two million” — about half on the insurers’ side and half employed in hospitals and doctors’ offices to argue with the former.
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“What we can’t quantify is the effect that high health care costs have had on non-health care industries.”
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The expense of paying for employees’ health care has depressed wages and entrepreneurship, he said. He described a textile manufacturer that moved more than 1,000 jobs out of the country because it couldn’t afford to pay for insurance for its workers. Such decisions have become common in recent years.