The problem with eliminating "waste" is the bang for the buck. It would take massive restructuring to cut the 7% administration in half. But then you've only sa

The problem with eliminating "waste" is the bang for the buck. It would take massive restructuring to cut the 7% administration in half. But then you've only saved 3.5%! So when addressing a problem, you start with the first order stuff, and then go to the second order stuff, and you do this in terms of impact, not in terms of conceptual clarity. Cut nurses and doctors, medical staff wages in half, and you save 40%. The real point here is that you can't have affordable healthcare if nurses are earning 6 figures. That's why nurses in the UK earn 40K/year. It's the price of affordable healthcare. That's the core trade off between affordable healthcare and US style healthcare. But all of a sudden now we do not have the same moral clarity as we did when we were only talking about "waste". So let's have that debate right now - the real healthcare debate, not the fake healthcare debate -- and stop pretending this is a problem that can be solved with waste while allowing nurses to keep their 6 figure salaries. It is what we call cheap moralism to decry how unfair high healthcare costs are in the US and then avoid raising any of the tough issues of what would happen to people whose livelihoods depend on those costs being so high.