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I've got a favorite hobby horse which is an example of this dynamic: The competing administrative bureaucracies in the health care administration, and health i

I've got a favorite hobby horse which is an example of this dynamic: The competing administrative bureaucracies in the health care administration, and health insurance, industries. Both of these classes of (so I claim) drones think they're doing good work: health care drones are trying to navigate the regulations and get care for their patients. Insurance drones are trying to navigate regulations and keep costs down. But if you zoom out a bit, so your domain of analysis is "The Health Care System", you find that these so-called competing bureaucracies are a large organ whose function is to make it difficult to accurately assign costs to services. As long as those prices are hard to know, they are impossible to optimize, and so the prices stay exorbitant.

asmithmd1 8y ago
That is absolutely a great example of bullshit jobs. It gets even worse when each side outsources this function to other companies. If they outsourced to the same company, then maybe some genuine efficiencies could be realized. When single payer healthcare comes up, free marketeers ask, "Do you want an unelected bureaucrat to decide if you get healthcare?" They must have never been in the situation where someone at the insurance company my employer picked - an unelected bureaucrat with a profit incentive - has denied coverage.
ansible 8y ago
> The competing administrative bureaucracies in the health care administration, and health insurance, industries. Our company once was in the same office building as another company that specialized in billing for health care. They would look at the services provided by a doctor's office, and figure out ways to code the procedures performed so that it would maximize the payout from the insurance. Doctors liked it because it was easy to sign up and just increase their revenue without doing any additional work.
- nradov 8y ago
  That's one of the reasons why insurers are moving away from the fee-for-service model toward value-based care. So those bullshit jobs at least will eventually disappear.
BadThink6655321 8y ago
The prices will stay hard to know because middlemen don’t like to be cut out.

asmithmd1 8y ago

That is absolutely a great example of bullshit jobs. It gets even worse when each side outsources this function to other companies. If they outsourced to the same company, then maybe some genuine efficiencies could be realized. When single payer healthcare comes up, free marketeers ask, "Do you want an unelected bureaucrat to decide if you get healthcare?" They must have never been in the situation where someone at the insurance company my employer picked - an unelected bureaucrat with a profit incentive - has denied coverage.

ansible 8y ago

> The competing administrative bureaucracies in the health care administration, and health insurance, industries. Our company once was in the same office building as another company that specialized in billing for health care. They would look at the services provided by a doctor's office, and figure out ways to code the procedures performed so that it would maximize the payout from the insurance. Doctors liked it because it was easy to sign up and just increase their revenue without doing any additional work.

nradov 8y ago
That's one of the reasons why insurers are moving away from the fee-for-service model toward value-based care. So those bullshit jobs at least will eventually disappear.

BadThink6655321 8y ago

The prices will stay hard to know because middlemen don’t like to be cut out.