Ok, Denny, one last shot at this.
You say VA healthcare costs $1400 per living veteran. While your numbers are a little off, that is not what is being disputed. You also claim that healthcare provided to the 30 million uninsured people should cost about the same per person.
Yet I've shown that approximately 2/3rds of vets use insurance other than the VA to pay for their healthcare. We should be able to provide the 30 million uninsured people VA-level care for the same price per person as we spend per veteran, but only if the same fraction of uninsured people as veterans decline to use the services.
But - and this is a key point - the uninsured don't have any other insurance. That's why they are called "uninsured". So they won't be using the other insurance they don't have. So it follows that 2/3rds of them won't be opting out of the plan.
Therefore, it won't cost the same per uninsured person as the VA plan costs per veteran. It will, in fact, cost (very roughly) three times more. I'm stunned that you haven't been able to grasp this. Veterans and uninsured people are not equivalent.
barfo
One more shot at this.
I've been saying that the government should be opening clinics all over the place. If they do, they'd be only incurring the cost of delivering the actual health care for people who show up needing care. Of the 30M uninsured, 83% will show up for services, but the vast majority of those people would be showing up for flu shots and blood and urine tests and those sorts of things.
The cost of delivering the care is not $7000 per person. For the vast majority of people, it costs a few $hundred a year.
The VA doesn't cover 100% of the costs of Vets' care, except in cases where the Vet is dirt poor and can't afford to pay the co-pay for service and co-pay for prescription drugs. The govt. option should work the same.
The government should charge those 30M people $1400 apiece, or $2000 apiece, and charge them co-payments. They shouldn't be paying for cadillac plans from insurance companies. It's supposed to compete, not be a guaranteed source of income for those companies.
There are catastrophic health care services that do cost a lot of money. Like Open-Heart Surgery. In the USA in 2006, there were 694,000 of them costing an average of $20,673, or a total of $14B. That's 694,000 out of 275M people, or .2% of the population. The cost of paying for all those heart surgeries is $52 per person per year in premiums.
The cost for all the trauma cases is about $80B, or $290 per person. That includes the vast majority of the brain surgeries people need.
I use 275M, which is the insured population. The actual population is about 310M, so the costs per person I've provided here are 10% less. And I'm being quite generous in using the worst case figures for how many are uninsured.
Prescription drugs represent 10% of all medical expenses in the USA.
So far, I've talked mostly about catastrophic care/needs. For $30/mo per person, the cost of two doctor visits per year plus x-rays and lab tests would be covered. Probably less since there's a lot of people who hate doctors and hospitals and won't even show up for the two visits.
As for veterans, those who do show up for care are far more likely to have some sort of expensive medical care needs. After all, they've been shot at, shot, lost limbs, subjected to psychological trauma, radiation and other toxins, etc. That you don't get it that these people represent the worst case in per capita health care needs is rather stunning.
The part of your post I bolded is utter nonsense.
