Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Thursday January 09 2020, @07:37PM (6 children)

    by fustakrakich (6150) on Thursday January 09 2020, @07:37PM (#941565) Journal

    Yeah, yeah, we know, fuck the poor...

    --
    La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +2  
       Insightful=1, Touché=1, Total=2
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   3  
  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday January 16 2020, @04:32PM (5 children)

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Thursday January 16 2020, @04:32PM (#944076) Homepage Journal

    Saying get your thieving hand out of my pocket is not the same as saying fuck the poor. I got nothing against charity but if you have pry the money from its rightful owner's wallet first under threat of imprisonment or death, it is not charity.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.