r/FluentInFinance • u/The-Lucky-Investor • 11d ago

“Medicare for All” would save the U.S $5.1 Trillion over 10 years Discussion/ Debate

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/11/30/easy-pay-something-costs-less-new-study-shows-medicare-all-would-save-us-51-trillion
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u/MizStazya 11d ago

It's because you don't pay for your nursing care. It's rolled into the room charge, so hospitals are highly incentivized to use as little nursing as possible. A 20-year-old who had an appendectomy, gets to the bathroom by themselves, and needs a couple doses of antibiotics and pain meds pays the exact same amount for nursing care as an 80-year-old 400 pound incontinent dementia patient with 15 medications, who needs turning every 2 hours, frequent bed changes, 1:1 feeding, multiple dressing changes, etc. If we charged for nursing care based on the actual amount of nursing time needed and used, they might not be so quick to run us bare bones.

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u/rileyjw90 10d ago

Nurses also spend a lot of money (use a lot of supplies). We don’t make the hospital any money at all. Doesn’t matter that those supplies are necessary and often life-saving, we still open them up and use them.

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u/MizStazya 10d ago

And hopefully charge for them - unlike nurses, most supplies CAN be billed, but we're pretty terrible about actually doing it IME.

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u/rileyjw90 10d ago edited 10d ago

There’s a lot of things at my hospital where there’s not even really a way to bill for things. We don’t scan things to specific patients. It just gets bundled into their stay (flushes, gauze, etc). But there are times bigger things get wasted because they fall on the floor or the practitioner misses and has to try again somewhere else (like placing an arterial line for example) that those things definitely don’t get billed because it’s the staffs fault. I also think of when I used to do CRRT in the ICU (continuous dialysis) sometimes they would decide to end therapy right after we’d started a new set or connected fresh bags of dialysate and those things are sooooooo expensive. Or when they stop the fentanyl/levophed/propofol etc drip after we’ve just hung a new bag or bottle like bro this shit is EXPENSIVE and here we are having to waste almost an entire bag of it!