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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: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 09 2020, @05:53PM (4 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday January 09 2020, @05:53PM (#941524)

    I've traveled the U.S. fairly extensively and I have yet to come across anything like a favela

    In the U.S. we don't let 'em build structures like that. The homeless poor in Miami live under expressways, in alleys and abandoned buildings, etc. Every year 36 hours before the nationally televised Orange Bowl parade the police sweep the city, arrest all the homeless and take them 22 miles out into the Everglades to Krome detention center for processing. They are released almost immediately to avoid problems with unlawful detention, but they're released out at Krome and most can't make their way back downtown in time for the TV cameras and the parades.

    The favelas of Rio are rough, but nothing like the rough neighborhoods in US cities. An adventurous tourist might try leaving most of their valuables at the hotel, carrying some pocket change for bribes and walking the favelas of Rio. Try that in a U.S. city and people will simply call you a fool when you end up hospitalized or dead. You can drive the bad parts of town and get away with it, though I had things thrown at my car several times in Miami, particularly the shiny new car, but walking... that's a fool's game. Point being, tourists/travelers in the US just don't go to our places that roughly equate to favelas, but they exist nonetheless.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 09 2020, @09:42PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 09 2020, @09:42PM (#941616)

    In the U.S. we don't let 'em build structures like that.

    No, but we let them decay to that. Many of the ghettos used to be somewhat nice, until the middle class whites left and the police withdrew.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 10 2020, @05:05PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 10 2020, @05:05PM (#941949)

      You know you're a racist fuckwad when you say "middle class whites" instead of the simpler "middle class."

      I'll leave you to sort out your own subconscious biases, since I'm sure you would protest that you're not a racist.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 11 2020, @02:31AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 11 2020, @02:31AM (#942124)

        The fact that the people who left where white is significant, you virtue signaling simpleton.

      • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday January 11 2020, @04:11AM

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday January 11 2020, @04:11AM (#942160)

        Of course Eddie Murphy is taking shit right now for playing the stereotype, but I've heard more than one black comedian riff on the theme: "you know that shopping mall, the one where the white people _used to_ shop?"

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