Benjamin Studebaker

Yet Another Attempt to Make the World a Better Place by Writing Things

Tag: Single Payer

August 24, 2018

The Problem With Fact Checkers is that They’re Journalists, Not Academics

The row between the fact checking websites and Medicare-for-all supporters has continued over the past couple weeks. I briefly weighed in to point out that, studies aside, it’s difficult to estimate the cost because it’s impossible for us to know what level of healthcare spending will, in the long-run, be politically acceptable. The attempts to get an estimate all involve assuming particular levels of spending ex ante. The Republicans can claim that we would need to continue spending 18% of GDP, but they don’t know. Bernie Sanders can claim that we would be able to impose Medicare’s level of compensation, but he doesn’t know. Just like in other countries with systems like this, the level of expenditure would constantly be up for political renegotiation. Britain spends 7% of its GDP on its National Health Service. Will we spend 7% or 18% or somewhere in between? Anyone who tells you that they know for sure is lying.

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August 7, 2018

Why It’s Hard to Calculate the Cost of Single Payer in the United States

Lately there has been some back and forth in the states over the expected cost of single payer healthcare. There is a lot of disagreement over how much single payer will cost because single payer grants the state a monopoly over the healthcare system. This means that the state can dictate how much it is going to pay its doctors, its administrators, its nurses, its drug and equipment manufacturers, and so on. Because the state can dictate the cost of single payer, the true cost of the proposal depends on how much the particular people implementing the proposal intend to spend.

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January 8, 2018

How to Read That Productivity/Wage Gap Chart We’re Always Seeing

You’ve probably seen this chart before. It’s everywhere now. I’ve used it more than a few times over the years. It’s the chart from the Economic Policy Institute that shows that while US productivity has continued to increased over the last few decades, real inflation-adjusted wages haven’t kept pace:

I’ve seen two bad misreadings of this chart lately, and I want to clear them up.

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September 15, 2017

What the Single Payer Movement Can Learn From “Repeal and Replace”

Single payer healthcare seems to be getting more popular. More people are becoming aware of the advantages of single payer. A majority of Americans now say that the government has a responsibility to make sure all Americans have healthcare coverage, and more than half of that majority now think the best way to do it is single payer:

The current push for single payer does however have a lot in common with another political movement–the Republican effort to repeal and replace Obamacare.

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June 2, 2017

Why Single Payer Works Better at the National Level than the State Level

There’s a single payer plan advancing in the state of California, and many people are excited about it. And for good reason–a single payer system can potentially extend coverage while cutting costs. I’ve written about the virtues of single payer many times before, but there is a political danger in attempting to do single payer at the state level. Ironically and tragically, the very economic forces which make single payer such a good federal policy create powerful dangers for state systems.

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