Solving the American Healthcare Debate

Whenever someone raises the idea starting a single-payer healthcare system in the United States, someone says it would cost too much. They act like people are naive and say things like, "I want a free pony too!"

According to OECD numbers, Canadians spent $4071 of public money per person in 2015. Americans, by contrast, spent $4692 of public money per person in 2015.

The Canadian system doesn't just cost less, it costs fewer public dollars than the American system. The private dollars poured into it by individuals are on top of this public spending.

We aren't talking about free ponies here. We are talking about stopping paying the full cost of a pony plus 15% to make sure no one has a pony, and then telling people they have to buy their own pony if they want one. I can't think of a reason for such a public policy other than lawmakers who feel indebted to the pony industry.

But I started thinking about those numbers. Suppose American lawmakers could wave a magic wand and having the Canadian system. In addition to all the private money that could be used for other things, the government would save $621 per person for 323.1 million people. That's just barely over $200 billion.

So you might think they are throwing $200 billion in a hole, but they aren't just throwing it in a hole, they are spending it. They are spending it to kill Americans. A 2009 study concluded that being uninsured meant about a 40% higher risk of death. America has a death rate of 823.7 per 100,000. The uninsured rate in America is was 11.3% in the first quarter of 2017. That death rate, is therefore composed of the 11.3% of people who have a 40% higher risk of death and the 88.7% who have a "normal" risk of death, which means the "normal" risk of death is 788.1 per 100,000. So the excess death rate caused by lack of insurance is 35.6 per 100,000. With 3231 groups of 100,000 Americans, that would give us

115,092 Americans dying each year from lack of insurance

.

Divide that into $200 billion and you get a price of about $1.74 million per american killed.

Now, let me ask you, what do you think it costs to hire an assassin?

That's not something I can google easily, nor is it even something I want to type into google. But I feel like it's safe to say you could procure that service for less than a million dollars.

So I have a solution to the current American healthcare problems. First, implement a single payer system that works much like Canada's does. Second, in order to mollify the people who don't like assistance from the government, also hire assassins to kill about 100,000 Americans a year.

Better health outcomes, lower prices. That's a win-win.

A Note for Those Interested in Making a Counterpoint
The math in this post looks simple but it's not that simple. Estimating the number of people who die from a lack of insurance is hard to impossible, and some people dispute there being any causal relationship between those two things at all. Some people want to say that no one dies from lack of access to healthcare, some people would probably point out that my figure of 115,000 is much higher than any other estimate, almost three times as high as the estimate from the study cited in one of my linked articles that was conducted before the ACA when there were more uninsured Americans.

So why would I use such a high estimate? I was being generous towards the current system. My calculation was the cost per American killed. More Americans killed by the current system means a lower cost per American killed. If a million Americans died a year from the lack of single payer healthcare, the cost would only be about $200,000 per death. At that point, you might say, "Humbabella, can you really get assassins for $200,000 a target? Maybe you could under some circumstances, but through government procurement processes?"

Then I'd have to admit that my plan probably wouldn't save money. But if only 10,000 Americans die for lack of healthcare then the cost is $20 million per American killed. There's no way that assassins aren't cheaper than that.

And if you think that no one dies for lack of healthcare, like some American politicians seem to, then I have two things to say.

First, you are transparently disingenuous and think I am stupid. Otherwise, you wouldn't want healthcare for yourself. If something that saves lives costs a penny more, other things being equal, some fraction of a statistical person dies. There's no way around that math.

Second, in that case you are paying $200 billion and not killing even a single one of your citizens for that? What the hell are you paying for?