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Where does all this extra money actually end up? Who benefits? Is it all shareholder profits? Employee salaries? Re-investments into research? Marketing and sa
by miki123211 3y ago
Where does all this extra money actually end up? Who benefits?
Is it all shareholder profits? Employee salaries? Re-investments into research? Marketing and sales budgets? Defending from liability lawsuits and liability insurance? Taxes? Construction workers that charge more for building hospitals than they do in other countries? What the hell is going on here?
The fact that the US spends more on healthcare isn't very interesting to me on its own. It doesn't really say what the US can do about it, moving to a single-payer system can reduce prices due to the government's bargaining power, but it can also increase prices and decrease quality due to no competition and no reason for anybody to care about efficient spending. If consumers have no choice, they will choose the option you provide, no matter how bad it is. A breakdown on what exactly the US spends more on would be far more enlightening.
If more money flows into the healthcare system, more money must flow out of it, and where exactly those outflows are is a far more interesting question for me.
- api 3y agoIt’s largely a massive ad-hoc jobs program. The number of people employed in health care administration is mind numbing.
- thereddaikon 3y agoIn my experience working the tech side of the healthcare industry, every aspect is inefficient and most players are doing their best to extract as much wealth as they can from it. There is a lot of room for improvement in terms of cost and efficiency. I've given up hope for a political solution. Nobody seems to want to talk about why everything is so expensive. They are too focused on who is going to pay for it.
- vidanay 3y agoI don't think inefficiencies are going to be the answer either. I'd bet that those other countries have just as inefficient medical bureaucracies.
- thereddaikon 3y agoI don't mean inefficiency in the bureaucratic sense. I mean it in the economic sense. Where stuff costs more than it actually should. There's a lot of rent seeking and middle men in the medical world that inflate costs.
- adgjlsfhk1 3y agoso roughly 20% goes to insurance company overhead (marketing and hiring people to deny claims and argue with doctors). another bunch goes to extra hospital administration (billing patients is expensive). there's also a bunch that goes to private equity companies that run ambulances, hospitals, and the rest.
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoIf cycrutchfield is correct (in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38719752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38719752), all the doctors put together get 10% of the spending. Insurance overhead gets twice as much as the doctors? That's insane. That's a huge amount of overhead that could be dramatically reduced with single payer. Still, that's only 20%. Would single payer reduce the other 80%? If so, how?