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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.
(Score: 2) by dry on Friday January 10 2020, @06:37AM (8 children)
$22,000 a year buys one fuck of a lot of medical. I've probably charged our medical system about a $1000 over 50 years, including a couple of hospital visits, my wife a bit more from when we had a child. Most people are healthy enough that they only need to visit the doctor a couple of times a year at CDN$38 a visit.
(Score: 2) by dry on Friday January 10 2020, @06:41AM
I should add that medical is a Provincial thing, the feds chip in but they sure don't cover everything, I think currently 20-30%
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday January 16 2020, @04:46PM (6 children)
And you want to pay $22K for something you pretty much never use? I doubt your fiscal sanity.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by dry on Thursday January 16 2020, @05:11PM (5 children)
Well, you pulled the $22K figure out of your ass but yes, I pay insurance for various things that I don't hardly ever use. Car insurance, house insurance are two things that come to mind. When a tree fell on my truck, I was happy to have the insurance and if I ever fucked up and put someone in a wheelchair, I'll be happy I pay for the extra coverage to pay them off.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday January 17 2020, @05:26PM (4 children)
Insurance of any kind is placing a recurring bet that your luck is shitty or that you're foolish enough to cause your own problems. How much better off would you be if all that money had been drawing interest this whole time because you took the most conservative investment strategy possible and stuck it in a bank? How much better off would you be if you only kept insurance against "I'm righteously fucked" situations and paid for the routine and predictable costs out of the money you saved?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by dry on Friday January 17 2020, @07:07PM (3 children)
As you say, it is a bet and I've been lucky but who knows what the future will bring. I've known enough people where saving wouldn't have covered their loses.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday January 17 2020, @10:34PM (2 children)
Saving and a payment plan would.
Unless of course you're advocating bottomless pockets treatment for world+dog. It may be some cold shit to say but how much you earn is a moderately good reflection of how much you contribute to society, at least in the form of your labor. Society paying several times what you'll earn in a lifetime to keep you healthy simply does not make sense. Not from a purely fiscal standpoint and not from a "most good for society for a given amount of dollars" standpoint. The only standpoint it makes sense from is most of us don't like seeing bad shit happen to good people, but you can't allow that to govern your economy or you very soon will not have an economy.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by dry on Saturday January 18 2020, @01:12AM (1 child)
Friend of mine had his house and everything burn down, and your response is that "saving and a payment plan" would have been better then insurance.
I also have to disagree that wages reflect someones contribution to society as too often it is the opposite, ad writers get paid more then farmers, CEO's who orchestrate cost savings that result in lots of deaths are the most important and researchers who do the grunt work for little pay to discover medicines that save a lot of lives are worth way less then bean counters.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday January 20 2020, @02:02PM
Homeowner's insurance is extremely inexpensive compared to the cost of a home or the insured's income. It's not uncommon for health insurance to cost you as much as a car payment. Every month. For the rest of your life. Even if you only use it for inexpensive stuff like a five minute visit and an antibiotic prescription maybe once a year. It's penny ante poker with friends vs. betting the rent money on blackjack in Vegas.
Ad writers do contribute more to society than farmers do, by the parts of society they serve. Those parts are not just faceless corporations, they're everyone who works at those corporations, their families, and everyone who does business with those corporations. You are not the sum total of society. You're not even a good representative of the average, because there can be no good representative of the average in such a diverse ecosystem.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.