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This was one of this posts that start out saying something reasonable and then makes some sleigh-of-hand to a claim that's entirely unsupported by those stateme
by lutorm 16y ago
This was one of this posts that start out saying something reasonable and then makes some sleigh-of-hand to a claim that's entirely unsupported by those statements:
"But Baumol’s Disease doesn’t explain ... how Medicare has leaped from $52 billion a year to $600 billion a year in a decade. ... What does explain these gigantic increases is monopoly powers granted to cartels by unaccountable State fiefdoms."
If this was true, Medicare spending per capita should have risen faster than health care costs in general. I was of the impression that was not the case. Surely the "unaccountable state fiefdoms" can not be responsible for the skyrocketing cost of non-government health care?
"Our national government is incapable of simplifying, improving public service efficiency"
I'm not sure what "public service efficiency" is but, again, I was of the impression that Medicare administrative costs were lower than that of the average private health plan.
- yummyfajitas 16y agoI was of the impression that was not the case. You appear to be correct. http://facts.kff.org/chart.aspx?ch=1804 http://facts.kff.org/chart.aspx?ch=1804 ..."public service efficiency"...administrative costs were lower than that of the average private health plan. Measuring the ratio of medical costs to administrative costs is a ridiculous way to measure efficiency. Consider one insurer which pays $75 in useful medical costs and $25 in administrative costs. In particular, this insurer spends $10 on fraud prevention and $15 on regular billing. This insurer has a medicine/admin ratio of 3 and spends 25% on administration. Consider another insurer which pays $75 in useful medical costs, has no fraud prevention department and spends another $15 on fraudulent medicine, and a regular billing dept costing $15. This insurer has a medicine/admin ratio of 6 and spends 14% on administration. By your metric, the second insurer appears more efficient in spite of spending 5% more money to deliver the same amount of useful medicine.
- lutorm 16y agoWell, to be fair it's not my metric. I was just saying that the one fact I remembered that could be construed as "public service efficiency" wrt Medicare did not support the authors' (unsubstantiated) claim.