What would we do with the surplus if we really fixed health care?

Pay down the deficit.

@marinelife… you beat me to it! exactly

Repair our broken public education system? Please?

If you have ever done business with the GSA you will know why this is not a good idea. They overpay for everything primarily because they are lousy payers and there is so much red tape with getting a product approved and in the system that the price of that item has to cover some of those costs. The biggest part of the problem is it is not their money and they spend it like a blank checkbook and managing our health care will be no different.

@Cruiser The government pinches pennies pretty well with Medicare. And if pretty much every other industrialized nation spends far less than we do on health care and gets good results, it seems like maybe government can do it plenty cheap enough. I mean have you seen how the French government works? We can’t possibly be less efficient than that.

@Cruiser But I’m really interested in hearing from folks like you that are very opposed to the current plan. Is my plan better or worse?

You would have to use mean (average) household income, not median.

“Pay down the deficit.”

There will never be enough money to do that.

The interest is around $700 billion a year.

@ChazMaz You’ve confused the deficit with the debt. Common problem. I expect @marinelife did too. But even if we are talking about the debt, we can pay it down, we just can’t pay it off anytime soon.

If we don’t have enough money to pay for what we need. We have a deficit. If part of the reason why is because of our debt. Is it not the same difference?

I agree with your premise. Our current system has insurance companies drawing 20% off the top with incentives to drop expensive patients and preventing people with pre-existing conditions from getting any kind of health care. To top it off, there are no anti-monopoly protections to control the companies. This is an ideal system to guarantee profits without benefiting the insured.

There is an instant 20% to be saved (about $1000 per capita) by installing a single payer system and increasing the pool by mandating insurance for everyone. The savings should be spent to educating future doctors and providing bonus payments for good results. There should also be limits on malpractice suits with truly dangerous doctors and institutions being closed down and the guilty receiving criminal prosecution. Frivolous suits should require restitution to the damage parties and punishment of lawyers clearly guilty of the offense.

Finally I don’t think that we should get rid of the VA hospitals because veterans have very different ailments than the general population and specialists are necessary to treat the combinations of likely problems. Medicare will be unnecessary because we would all share the same system and there is no need for specialized care based solely on age.

I suggest some of the savings be spent on buying packaged nuclear power plants from France. They seem to be able to make safe reasonably priced energy at a tenth of the price we pay here.

We can solve the health care and energy crisis and pollution all at the same time. Maybe we could have a middle class tax break with the money saved.

Start working on education.

Debt, deficit. whatever, pay one of them.

Probably piss it away in a conflict with some little sit splat country like we did with our last surplus.

@Snarp I agree with your idea, but any savings would likely be dribbled away on some conflict as @Blondesjon says. The VA system could be reduced, in a unified healthcare scheme, to service-related conditions not easily treatable in a “civilian” setting.

This did happen in Germany from time to time. The health insurances lowered the premiums and did invest some of the surplus to prepare for years with deficits.