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0 pointsars10y ago0 comments

That would have other benefits. The reason health insurance in the US is so expensive and complicated is exactly because of how commercial plans fund medicare.

If we stopped doing that hospitals could publish actual prices for procedures - same price for everybody, insurance or not. Then people could actually shop around and healthcare costs would drop.

But today prices have to be secret and impossible to understand or the way commercial plans fund medicare would collapse.

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shanusmagnus10y ago

The expense and complication is due to many, many more factors than how commercial plans fund Medicare. Medicare could disappear entirely and the price transparency you describe would not change one iota. They are largely orthogonal issues.

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