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posted by janrinok on Thursday January 09 2020, @12:40PM   Printer-friendly
from the pen-pushers-are-expensive dept.

Study: More than a third of healthcare costs go to bureaucracy:

U.S. insurers and providers spent more than $800 billion in 2017 on administration, or nearly $2,500 per person – more than four times the per-capita administrative costs in Canada’s single-payer system, a new study finds.

Over one third of all healthcare costs in the U.S. were due to insurance company overhead and provider time spent on billing, versus about 17% spent on administration in Canada, researchers reported in Annals of Internal Medicine.

Cutting U.S. administrative costs to the $550 per capita (in 2017 U.S. dollars) level in Canada could save more than $600 billion, the researchers say.

“The average American is paying more than $2,000 a year for useless bureaucracy,” said lead author Dr. David Himmelstein, a distinguished professor of public health at the City University of New York at Hunter College in New York City and a lecturer at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

“That money could be spent for care if we had a ‘Medicare for all program’,” Himmelstein said.

To calculate the difference in administrative costs between the U.S. and Canadian systems, Himmelstein and colleagues examined Medicare filings made by hospitals and nursing homes. For physicians, the researchers used information from surveys and census data on employment and wages to estimate costs. The Canadian data came from the Canadian Institute for Health Information and an insurance trade association.

When the researchers broke down the 2017 per-capita health administration costs in both countries, they found that insurer overhead accounted for $844 in the U.S. versus $146 in Canada; hospital administration was $933 versus $196; nursing home, home care and hospice administration was $255 versus $123; and physicians’ insurance-related costs were $465 versus $87

They also found there had been a 3.2% increase in U.S. administrative costs since 1999, most of which was ascribed to the expansion of Medicare and Medicaid managed-care plans. Overhead of private Medicare Advantage plans, which now cover about a third of Medicare enrollees, is six-fold higher than traditional Medicare (12.3% versus 2%), they report. That 2% is comparable to the overhead in the Canadian system.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday January 09 2020, @03:32PM (4 children)

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Thursday January 09 2020, @03:32PM (#941446) Homepage Journal

    I wasn't making any assumptions at all, I was just stating the figures.

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  • (Score: 1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 09 2020, @05:20PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 09 2020, @05:20PM (#941509)

    You're the kind of stupid that thinks you're smart. The worst kind of stupid.

    • (Score: 1, Troll) by c0lo on Thursday January 09 2020, @11:07PM (1 child)

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 09 2020, @11:07PM (#941666) Journal

      the kind of stupid that thinks you're smart. The worst kind of stupid

      Nope. The worst kind of stupid is the active stupid - no matter the reasons for the active state (e.g Dunning-Kruger or something else)

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      • (Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 10 2020, @05:01PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 10 2020, @05:01PM (#941948)

        But those are usually pretty obvious. The ones who think they're smart tend to sway the less critical thinkers who admire the air of confidence more than the actual content. People will even admire a terrible person for "sticking to their guns" or "takes a lotta balls." Ironically you can see that in buzzy's journal. That is why he admires Trump even while calling him an idiot, they are both the same cult of personality narcissists.

  • (Score: 1, Troll) by sjames on Thursday January 16 2020, @03:24AM

    by sjames (2882) on Thursday January 16 2020, @03:24AM (#943888) Journal

    I wasn't making any assumptions at all, I was just stating the figures with the most ludicrous spin I could come up with.

    FTFY