The answer, of course, is that Medicare itself is already a big part of the problem in its offloading of costs onto the private sector of health care, and their plans for “saving money” if applied only to Medicare would simply increase the rate of cost growth in the private sector even more. If the entire system was converted to Medicare, onto whom would they offload their excess costs? Nothin’ left but the taxpayers.

Health care is a supply/demand market like any other. Supply is limited, demand is unlimited and inelastic. In such a market, health care costs will always grow faster than disposable income. Axiomatic: Boosting supply costs money, and while the increase in supply might make some individual procedures cost a bit less, overall the system would STILL be using more money than previous. The ONLY way to hold overall system cost steady or shrink it is to RATION SUPPLY and live with shortages. Consume less.

Are there some systemic efficiencies to be gained? No doubt. You can realize some one-time system savings (or at least lower cost growth rates) through increased efficiencies, but once those efficiencies are absorbed, costs resume rising at excess rates. We saw that already with the advent of managed care. We’ve seen it in every other industrialized nation, regardless of whether they have private, pubic, or mixed systems. It happens in the UK, in France, etc., just as it happens here.

No magic bullets.

It’s a mathematical certainty, comprehendable even by gradeschoolers, that adding more money to a system is categorically incapable of REDUCING the cost of the system.

Claiming to “attack rising health care costs” by putting more money into the sytem is something even a child should scoff at. When A and B are positive numbers, A + B is not less than A. NOT ROCKET SCIENCE.

It’s somewhat akin to the old joke about losing a little on every unit sold, but making it up on volume….

Where systemic efficiencies can be realized without leaving anyone worse off, we should exploit them. Any “reform” that does not consist of reducing systemic inefiiciencies is at best political sleight-of-hand, and should be roundly mocked until the ACTUAL effects are explained, including who’s getting screwed and who’s being rearded in the political money-shuffling.