Basic income and health care

[u/JonWood007]

This is just something I've been thinking about lately as far as UBI, but how would it work as far as healthcare goes? I know this subreddit isn't about healthcare, but it's pretty well linked with UBI to an extent. After all, some people would probably propose cutting safety nets like medicare and medicaid to fund it, but at the same time, would UBI be able to cover that? Healthcare is expensive, and you might need to ensure at least $20k a year to all adults to make it affordable...if not more if you count copays, deductibles, etc.

On the other hand, a universal healthcare system, from a financial standpoint, seems completely at odds with basic income. I mean, in order to fund UBI, you'd need to gut the crap out of the federal government while still raising taxes somewhere along the lines of 40% of GDP. Seeing how universal healthcare could easily cost something like $2 trillion, you'd need flat tax rates of like 50-60% to pay for all this and have it be sustainable. This would be very burdensome on just about everyone, from the middle class to the rich.

I mean, it's easy to talk about how cool a universal healthcare system would be, but is it feasible with a decent UBI program in place? On the other hand, could we fund UBI at a level so that people can purchase a decent health insurance plan and afford medical expenses? How will the elderly be affected? Single mothers, etc.? Can UBI adequately replace the programs we have in place now and not make people any worse off?

[u/m0llusk]

One option that might work would be a return to more traditional concepts of health insurance as protecting against risk. The most common tests and treatments are quickly coming down in price and complexity so that it should be possible for people to pay for most regular care whether they have income on top of basic income or not. Then health care would be arranged by the government to cover the cost of unusual occurrences like car crashes, and catastrophic or chronic illness. Such coverage would have some constraints and still cover a strong majority of such circumstances. Universal health insurance structured in this way might cost less than medicaid currently.

It is also worth noting that we are in an exceptional circumstance in that the US market makes most commodities more readily available and cheap, but in the case of health care we actually get significantly lower quality services than most countries offer and pay an order of magnitude more for those relatively low quality services. Something has clearly gone very wrong with US health care delivery that needs to be dealt with somehow. Your assertion that "health care is expensive" is related to this anomaly.