Health Care Headed for One-Fifth of US Economy — Timothy Taylor

The US is a global anomaly. This is the kind of "exceptionalism" one wants, other than those that are profiting from it.

Conversable Economist
Health Care Headed for One-Fifth of US Economy
Timothy Taylor | Managing editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, based at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota

Jason Del Ray — Amazon is creating a health care company with the help of Warren Buffett and JPMorgan Chase

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase are working with the e-commerce giant.

Game-changer?

Recode

Amazon is creating a health care company with the help of Warren Buffett and JPMorgan Chase
Jason Del Ray

ht Brad DeLong at Grasping Reality

See also

The e-commerce giant is muscling its way into a number of businesses that banks have long dominated.

American Banker
How Amazon is shaking up financial services

Keven Wack

Linda Ramsey — The US spends twice as much on healthcare as other developed nations and gets worse outcomes — and the reasons why show what it’s going to take to reform healthcare

• A new review in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that America spends about twice as much as other high-income countries on healthcare. 

• At the same time, the health outcomes, or how well people fare with their health, aren't any better and are often worse than countries that spend half as much on healthcare as the US does.

• The study's authors concluded that the main reason the US spends so much has to do with the prices of labor, goods (like pharmaceuticals), and administrative costs — not how often Americans get certain procedures, which was no more than any other country. 

Explains the higher cost but not poorer outcomes.

Business Insider
The US spends twice as much on healthcare as other developed nations and gets worse outcomes — and the reasons why show what it’s going to take to reform healthcare
Lydia Ramsey

Aaron Carroll — Why America Needs Foreign Medical Graduates

The American system relies to a surprising extent on foreign medical graduates, most of whom are citizens of other countries when they arrive. By any objective standard, the United States trains far too few physicians to care for all the patients who need them. We rank toward the bottom of developed nations with respect to medical graduates per population.…

Although many feared that coverage expansions from the Affordable Care Act might lead to an overwhelmed physician work force, that didn’t happen. That doesn’t mean that America doesn’t have a shortage of physician services, especially when it comes to the care of the oldest, the poorest and the most geographically isolated among us. Even though we know foreign medical graduates care for those patients disproportionately, we make it very difficult for many born and trained elsewhere to practice here. Some Americans need these doctors desperately. Evidence suggests that policies should be made to attract them, not deter them.

This is a New York Times piece.

The "solution" of importing medical personnel is completely bonkers. 

First, and most importantly, it deprives the people of other countries of an important real resources for which they receive exactly nothing. It is grossly unfair.

Secondly, the US is perfectly capable of recruiting and training its own medical personnel as one of the most highly develop nations. 

This should be a scandal of incompetence in resource management and scamming off the rest of the world.

The Incidental Economist
Why America Needs Foreign Medical Graduates
Aaron Carroll

Zaid Jilani — Single Payer Opponents Say The Transition Process Would Be Too Difficult. But 10,000 People Do It Every Day.

Opponents of single payer health care frequently claim that such a system might be wonderful in theory, but getting there would be too disruptive. Many Americans, the argument goes, have private health insurance coverage and the transition to a government plan would be jarring.

“Half of America gets their health insurance coverage on the job,” American Hospital Association lobbyist and former Connecticut Democratic congressman Bruce Morrison told The Intercept last month. Single payer would replace coverage for some 150 million people, he noted. “If you just leaped to Medicare for All, you would totally disrupt the expectations of all those people. And that would not be a good idea.”

But roughly 10,000 Americans make that transition every single day. We call them seniors who are enrolling in Medicare for the first time....

“If you just leaped to Medicare for All, you would totally disrupt the expectations of all those people. And that would not be a good idea,” has to be one of the moronic statements I have ever encountered. Just about everyone would be delighted based on the experience of those already on Medicare that "graduated" from the private insurance market.

The Intercept
Single Payer Opponents Say The Transition Process Would Be Too Difficult. But 10,000 People Do It Every Day.
Zaid Jilani

Noah Smith — Handwaving on health care

Noah Smith on Greg Mankiw and John Cochrane. Mankiw actually comes off quite well. Cochrane, not so much.

I think that Noah has it right. Health care is not as much an economic (positive) issue as it is a moral (normative) one. This is the ground on which it will ultimately be decided politically.

Noahpinion
Handwaving on health care
Noah Smith | Bloomberg View columnist

Zero Hedge — Obamacare Repeal Officially Dead After Cruz Says No

In a sudden change of heart that kills senate Republicans’ effort to pass a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare before a rule allowing Republicans to circumvent a Democratic filibuster expires at the end of the month, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is now saying he won’t support the Graham-Cassidy Obamacare repeal bill.

Cruz, who revealed his position during a panel discussion at a Texas Tribune conference in Austin, suggested that the proposal also lacks the vote of Sen. Mike Lee, according to Politico. The Texas Republican said he and Lee offered amendments to the Graham-Cassidy proposal last week that would go further in bringing down Obamacare premiums but that the changes weren’t included in the latest draft of the bill.

Governing is harder than opposing.

Zero Hedge
Obamacare Repeal Officially Dead After Cruz Says No
Tyler Durden

Also

Time
President Trump Says He Expected a Health Care Bill on His Desk As Soon as He Got Into Office
Aric Jenkins

Zaid Jilani — GOP Senator Wants to Ban State Single Payer In New Health Care Bill

Louisiana Republican Sen. John Kennedy plans to use the most recent effort to repeal and replace portions of the Affordable Care Act to push an amendment that would bar states from enacting their own single-payer systems, he told reporters on Monday.

When asked by The Intercept on Tuesday about the status of his legislation, Kennedy said that the bill’s co-sponsors, Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Bill Cassidy, R-La., told him that the measure already bans single payer, but that he was welcome to offer his amendment either way.

“I don’t think states should have the authority to take money from the American taxpayer and set up a single-payer system,” Kennedy said. “Now some people think that that’s inconsistent with the idea of flexibility. But that’s what the United States Congress is for. I very much believe in flexibility, and I know the governors want flexibility. But it’s our job to make sure that that money is properly spent.”

Kennedy’s amendment is similar to pre-emption laws many states have passed to prohibit municipalities from controlling their own minimum wages or enacting municipal broadband. These laws have emanated from the American Legislative Exchange Council, a policy network funded by corporations.…

The Intercept
So Much for States’ Rights — GOP Senator Wants to Ban State Single Payer In New Health Care Bill
Zaid Jilani

Dennis J Bernstein — The Push for a Medicare-for-All Plan

Sen. Bernie Sanders has unveiled a new single-payer healthcare plan which would provide all Americans with government-sponsored health coverage. Sanders’s plan, supported by some 16 Democrats in the Senate, calls for an overhaul of the healthcare system with what would essentially be a tweaked and revitalized version of Medicare-for-all.

“Today we say that a function of a rational healthcare system is to provide quality care to all in a cost-effective way,” declared Sanders, an independent from Vermont, “and not to continue a system which allows insurance companies and drug companies to make hundreds of billions in profits each year and makes healthcare industry CEO’s extremely wealthy.”

Flanked by supporting senators in making his Wednesday announcement, Sanders also noted that a Medicare-for-all program would end “the complexity of a system which adds enormous stress at a time when people need it the least.”...

Consortium News
The Push for a Medicare-for-All Plan
Dennis J Bernstein

Chase Madar — The Conservative Case for Universal Healthcare

Democrats may be about to lose a core issue if they don't wake up.

The American Conservative

The Conservative Case for Universal Healthcare
Chase Madar

David Dayen — Single Payer, Meet All Payer: The Surprising State That Is Quietly Revolutionizing Health Care

Maryland.

The Intercept
Single Payer, Meet All Payer: The Surprising State That Is Quietly Revolutionizing Health Care
David Dayen

Zaid Jilani — Trumpcare Is Dead. “Single Payer Is the Only Real Answer,” Says Medicare Architect.

Many health care activists are now pushing to adopt what is called a “single payer” health care system, where one public health insurance program would cover everyone. The U.S. currently has one federal program like that: Medicare. Expanding it polls very well.

One of the activists pushing for such an expansion is Max Fine, someone who is intimately familiar with the program — because he helped create it. Fine is the last surviving member of President Kennedy’s Medicare Task Force, and he was also President Johnson’s designated debunker against the health insurance industry.

Fine, now 91, wrote to The Intercept recently to explain that Medicare was never intended to cover only the elderly population, and that expanding it to everyone was a goal that its architects long campaigned for....

Could the GOP pick up on this?

After the death of the Senate healthcare bill yesterday, The Intercept reached out to Fine for comment about where Congress should go next. “Single payer is the only real answer and some day I believe the Republicans will leap ahead of the Democrats and lead in its enactment,” he speculated, “just as did Bismarck in Germany and David Lloyd George and Churchill in the UK.”

No way the presently configured GOP could ever pass anything like this.

The Intercept
Trumpcare Is Dead. “Single Payer Is the Only Real Answer,” Says Medicare Architect.
Zaid Jilani

Robert Waldmann — Bizarro World

Health insurers confess to be being held hostage by Wall Street against their will. Some GOP senators react.

Capitalism at its "finest."

Angry Bear

Bizarro World
Robert Waldmann

beowulf — June 14, 1946 or how to pay for universal healthcare

As I’ve mentioned before, the guy who had universal healthcare figured out was the gruff former Congressman Pete Stark. His Americare bill from 2009 should be updated and made the Democratic alternative to the Senate bill….

Monetary Realism
June 14, 1946 or how to pay for universal healthcare

beowulf

Mike Murphy — House health-care bill is too ‘mean,’ Trump reportedly tells senators

President Donald Trump called the House-approved health-care bill “mean” and told a group of Republican senators that their bill should be “more generous,” according to reports Tuesday....

In Tuesday’s lunch with 15 Republican senators, both the Associated Press and CNN reported that Trump said the House bill did not do enough to protect individuals. “We need to be more generous, more kind,” he said, according to the AP....

Trump shows again that he is more politically savvy than his party. Can save them from themselves?

MarketWatch
House health-care bill is too ‘mean,’ Trump reportedly tells senators

Mike Murphy | Editor

Also

Congressional sources say President Donald Trump has told Republican senators that the House healthcare bill is "mean" and that the Senate version should be "more generous."

The remarks were a surprising critique of a Republican-written House measure whose passage Trump fought for and embraced. They also seem to undercut efforts by Senate conservatives to impose restrictions in their chamber’s legislation, such as curbing the Medicaid health care program for the poor and limiting the services insurers must cover....

Business Insider
Trump tells GOP senators that the House healthcare bill he celebrated in Rose Garden ceremony is 'mean'
Bob Bryan and Associated Press

Andy Serwer — Charlie Munger says single-payer healthcare is the solution

Charlie Munger says that single-payer healthcare is the answer to fix the nation’s healthcare system woes.…

The political process is not working to deliver a solution.

“A benign despot would create a single payer system with people being able to opt out into private care that was a little faster or a little fancier like all of Europe and Canada,” he said.

Yahoo Finance
Charlie Munger says single-payer healthcare is the solution

Andy Serwer

Charles Krauthammer — Conservatives Are Losing On Healthcare

“Over these past seven years people’s expectations have changed,” [Krauthammer] said. “The grounds [for healthcare debate] are all liberal grounds…It’s showing that the country is at a point where I think it believes in universal coverage.”

For those outside the US or just not paying attention Charles Krauthammer is one of the deans of American conservatism. The Daily Caller is conservative media.

The Daily Caller
Krauthammer: Conservatives Are Losing On Healthcare

Amber Athey

See also

Breitbart News
Krauthammer: ‘We’ll Be In a Single-Payer System’ In ‘Less Than Seven Years’
Ian Hanchett

David F. Ruccio — “Money makes time”

Mainstream economists argue that time makes money. According to the Austrians, production takes time, because of “roundabout” methods, which creates the additional value that flows to capital. Neoclassical economists have a different theory: the return to capital is the reward for savings created by time-deferred consumption. However, in both cases, time is the basis of the value that is captured as profits.*….

Occasional Links & Commentary
“Money makes time”
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics, University of Notre Dame

Mark Weisbrot — Medicaid Saved Obamacare and Single-Payer May Be Back on the Agenda Sooner Than You Think

Some polls have shown majorities in favor of single payer health care. In the last election cycle we also went rather quickly from a widely believed politician-and-media-backed falsehood that Social Security was in serious financial trouble, to even Hillary Clinton saying that benefits needed to be expanded, not cut. That is the direction that the country is going, with Bernie Sanders, despite losing the Democratic presidential primary, being one of the most popular politicians in the country; and Trump in the doghouse with 37 percent approval....

Counterpunch
Medicaid Saved Obamacare and Single-Payer May Be Back on the Agenda Sooner Than You Think

Mark Weisbrot

Lee Fang — GOP Lawmakers Now Admit Years of Obamacare Repeal Votes Were a Sham

It is hard to overestimate the role of the Affordable Care Act in the Republican resurgence.

Over the last seven years, the GOP has won successive elections by highlighting problems with Obamacare, airing more than $235 million in negative ads slamming the law, and staging more than fifty high-profile repeal votes. In 2016 every major Republican presidential candidate, including Donald Trump, campaigned on a pledge to quickly get rid of it.

Now in total control of Congress and the White House, some GOP legislators are saying that the political assault on Obamacare was an exercise in cynical politics, and that an outright repeal was never on the table.

“We have Republicans who do not want to repeal Obamacare,” said Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., on Sirius XM Patriot on Wednesday.

“They may have campaigned that way, they may have voted that way a couple of years ago when it didn’t make any difference,” Brooks continued. “But now that it makes a difference, there seems to not be the majority support that we need to pass legislation that we passed fifty or sixty times over five or six years.”…

Cue enraged base.

The Intercept
GOP Lawmakers Now Admit Years of Obamacare Repeal Votes Were a Sham
Lee Fang