r/FluentInFinance 13d 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/Ginden 13d ago

What’s your proposal?

Pay 100 billions to Novo Nordisk (something like 20 times their profit from Ozempic) and make patent available for free.

It's probably the best investment possible, as US is estimated to lose $170B every year (2016 prices) due to obesity and overweight.

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u/Old_Height_8351 12d ago

There may be a short term effect of losing weight using drugs, but they won’t be on this med forever and likely revert back to their old weight because the root cause hasn’t been solved. Poor lifestyle habits, poor diet choices, and sleeping habits

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u/Ginden 12d ago

So what?

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u/Old_Height_8351 12d ago

One thing we should take into consideration here is how immensely hard it would be to change from our current model to a Medicare for all model. The entire system is built a certain way and, whether you like it or not, a lot of people have made their living in this system. If you take that away you’re taking away jobs. That could be hard.

Likely, a change like this would take decades if we wanted to do it well, and we’d still have a private system for the wealthy just like in other countries with social medicine. So you could inadvertently be creating a system that’s worse for poor people.

And this would be a massive upfront cost to implement. Long term that could still workout favorably but we do have a quite the debt crisis in this country at the moment.

Just some thoughts. I don’t like what large insurance companies are doing either