A fragmented system with strong incentives to play hot potato and then screen and select patients facing a fairly consolidated market sector (hospitals) is really expensive with lots of administrative overhead.
WOW — this is usually the second, or perhaps the third lecture in any Intro to the US Healthcare System course.
Health insurance administrative costs are indeed much higher in the U.S. than in other countries. That’s driven primarily by private insurance. In traditional Medicare, administrative costs are 1.3% of total spending.
www.kff.org/medicare/iss…
— Larry Levitt (@larrylevitt.bsky.social) December 6, 2024 at 10:57 AM
Mathguy
Trust Elmo the Idiot to get it wrong.
Old School
The answer, of course, is to eliminate Medicaid/Medicare!
Steve LaBonne
@Old School: And VA health care, don’t forget that.
Skippy-san
I’m really afraid of what they plan to do to VA benefits. It’s disturbing that they plan to take them away once they have been awarded- especially since it took me almost two years to establish my evidence and convince them to raise my disability rating.
SiubhanDuinne
Query: Is Elon the stupidest man on earth, or the stupidest man in the world?
Baud
It would be pretty funny if this experience turned Elon into a socialist.
MISTERPUFF
Willful blindness!
scav
If Americans expected services / performance commensurate with monetary outlay Elmo, there would be zero market for Telsa you twit.
WereBear
@SiubhanDuinne: Trump is the stupidest in the world. And now he’s demented in all definitions.
WereBear
A bright friend, re Musk, asked, “But isn’t he a genius?”
“I hear he was a precocious child and his kindergarten cost 50k, but he still hasn’t learned to share and he’s sure built an empire of X. Makes trucks that blow up.”
By this time he’s laughing.
Urza
I would rather have stoned high school sophomores running things. They usually actually want to solve the problem and make things better, usually by helping people. Can also distract them when they’re about to do something dumb or destructive.
@mistermix.bsky.social
Over at LGM, one of the commenters’ comments that Campos front paged made the point that health insurance companies are financial institutions, not healthcare providers of any kind.
Gloria DryGarden
@SiubhanDuinne: stupidest man in space.
Aziz, light!
The only solution is to load all the health insurance administrators onto Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B.
Urza
@Aziz, light!: Pretty sure the best way to save the world the most money is to load all the greedy billionaires, so 98% of them, onto a Mars rocket and let them build a colony there with all of their expertise and intelligence. We can even send food rockets periodically until their wealth runs out or they no longer need it because the colony is going so well.
The Audacity of Krope
::Laughs darkly::
WereBear
@Urza: I would prefer college sophomores. And good weed. Get your variables set up right.
Also, we can argue like the Macedonians. One night sober, second night drunk. To cover all bases.
NotMax
Those reams of claims forms don’t fill themselves out, don’tcha know.
//
WaterGirl
@@mistermix.bsky.social:
That’s a perfect example of a statement that is absolutely true and obvious once you see it and you marvel that you haven’t put it together like that before.
Ruckus
@Skippy-san:
My healthcare is the VA. Along with a fair number of other citizens with military service. Take that away and see how well that goes. Of course it will cost a hell of a lot more to restore any part of what shitforbrains destroys than it saves. And I can imagine the noise that will be heard if all of it is destroyed. He’s pissed because he got elected – again? Shouldn’t he count his blessings that he hasn’t been awarded time for his 34 felonies – yet? And likely never will be. But then given who/what he is I imagine that 34 isn’t his upper limit.
Bill Arnold
@Ruckus:
There was a little cautionary preview of such consequences this week…
Ohio Mom
It’s a little misleading to call all of those expenses “administration.”
Very little of it is actually administration, e.g., pushing papers to make sure bills are paid, collecting data and analyzing it, developing policies and procedures, etc.
Most of it is profit paid to stockholders in dividends. I wish that was clearer on this and similar charts.
I can’t help but suspect that calling dividends “administrative costs” is a sleight of hand perpetuated by the insurance companies. We do ourselves no favors by parroting their PR.
Quaker in a Basement
T. R. Reid did wonderful work exploring this topic several years back. “The Healing of America” offered a comparative study of healthcare practices in a variety of countries. Best of all, it was not at all technical or wonky. Instead, it focused on the experiences of ordinary patients, not just critical or chronic cases.
different-church-lady
And on top of that, all that administration is utterly incompetent.