the coherent conservative position is that cheaper plans with higher deductibles are a very good thing, because they’re much closer to what insurance ought to be — and the more they proliferate, the cheaper health care will ultimately be for everyone.
.. spending, as of 2014, just 5 percent of G.D.P. on health care. (By comparison, a typical Western European country that year spent around 10 percent; the United States spent 17 percent.)
.. Singaporeans do not spend money voluntarily saved in health-savings accounts. Under their Medisave program, they spend money saved in mandatory health-savings accounts, to which employers contribute as well. Second, their catastrophic insurance doesn’t come from a bevy of competing health insurance companies, but from a government-run single-payer system, MediShield. And then the government maintains a further safety net, Medifund, for patients who can’t cover their bills, while topping off Medisave accounts for poorer, older Singaporeans
.. By forcing its citizens to save and manage their own spending
.. I just hope those principles are a comfort to them when the next wave of liberalism delivers us to a much more plausible health insurance destination than Singapore: Straightforward single-payer, in the form of Medicaid for almost all.
Close Trump friend says ditch Paul Ryan’s plan and embrace universal health care
Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy calls for Medicaid for all.
A key Trump friend and ally is urging the president to dump Paul Ryan’s Affordable Health Care Act and embrace something that sounds sort of like a lightweight version of a single-payer health care system.
.. Reject the phony private health insurance market as the panacea. Look to an upgraded Medicaid system to become the country’s blanket insurer for the uninsured.
.. Get Democrats to agree to modest tort reform to help lower medical costs.
.. Yet despite the program’s limitations, the evidence is overwhelming that people who receive Medicaid like it.
Indeed, surveys tend to show that people who obtained Obamacare coverage via Medicaid are happier with their coverage than those who get subsidized private insurance on the new marketplaces.
.. But Trump really did campaign on a promise of universal coverage. And as he told CBS’s Scott Pelley back during the primary, “the government’s gonna pay for it.”