My Plan for US Healthcare

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We've got insurance companies, hospital companies and pharmaceutical companies all trying to enrich their stockholders. So health care inflation always beats the CPI and other measures of general inflation.

Even republicans are jumping on the healthcare bandwagon. All the healthcare plans being proposed are very expensive to enact. So mine is too, but I think that it is better. (I'm not running for president of the US in 2019, so you'll just have to wait for someone to pick this up in their platform.)

I think that capitalism has galloped too far ahead of normal good sense. The government should buy a controlling interest in the stock of all US health and LTC insurers, in all US hospital companies, and in all US pharma companies. Then the government would have power to steer all the companies towards a more integrated and better and cheaper healthcare system. Or at least they could do some price fixing which includes a normal profit, just like the government does for utility companies now.

No doubt insurers and pharma are making big bucks today. I have no idea how much it would take for the government to buy 100% of these companies. But if the government spent 20 trillion buying up pharma, insurers ,and hospital companies, how long would it take for the government to earn 20 trillion in profit? The income stream would go 100% to the government. That money could be used to pay down the debt incurred in purchasing the stock of the companies and to improve healthcare with research grants and such..

So it's a bit socialist, like Social Security or Medicare. But the ultimate destiny of rampant capitalism is something like this; Jeff Bezos has all of the money and the other 299,999,999 do whatever he says, as they are all totally dependent on him for their livelihoods.

Just take Bernie Sanders' plan for single-payer healthcare and rebrand it LibertyCare or something. Conservatives (or at least the alt-right) would be supporting it by tomorrow.

Worked for Andrew Yang's "Freedom Dividend".

But in all seriousness, prices of meds are the bigger concern. We pay many times more for meds than most other countries in the US. If those can go down, it will make any universal health care idea far more realistic.

I looked around the internet trying to figure the market value of pharma hospitals and insurers. It came to less than 3 trillion. When the TARP says the the government was committed to $16 trillion to pay for the 2008 catastrophe, and that almost 5 trillion has been paid it in the rescue so far, it makes purchasing the healthcare industry and making it a quasi-governmental organization seem cheap. I think that Bernie should consider my idea. He's too much a centrist.

latest figures i found is that 1/3 of our national health care expenditures go to waste, fraud, abuse. that amount of money, roughly a trillion dollars, would PAY to insure the 50+million under-insured and uninsured in this nation.