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>it accounts for 17% of the US GDP, so although it's parasitic for everyone involved, it's basically indispensable to the economy if people weren't forced to s
by knome 2y ago
>it accounts for 17% of the US GDP, so although it's parasitic for everyone involved, it's basically indispensable to the economy
if people weren't forced to spend it on healthcare, they would spend it elsewhere. if healthcare was free tomorrow, the GDP would be fine, just redistributed.
- wahnfrieden 2y agoThey would also be healthier to contribute other economically productive labor and organization. When people get sick or die they stop working.
- burnte 2y agoYeah, going single payer alone could reduce that 17% to 13%, maybe more, just through eliminating all the barriers insurers put up to providers being paid and administrative overhead.
- gruez 2y agoSource? A study from KFF puts "administration" responsible for only 12% of the increase the US pays over comparable countries, or less than 1 percentage points. [1] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/what-drives-health-spending-in-the-u-s-compared-to-other-countries/#Healthcare%20spending%20per%20capita,%20by%20spending%20category,%202021 https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/what-drives-health...
- istjohn 2y ago> Administrative costs include spending on running governmental health programs and overhead from insurers, but exclude administrative expenditures from healthcare providers. From what I've read, healthcare providers spend an inordinant amount of time and effort dealing with insurance companies.
- rickydroll 2y agoDon't forget the overhead created by PBMs and when insurance companies also own the PBM and the drugstore
- burnte 2y agoCorrect, it's cost both for insurers AND provider organizations. We have an entire team of humans who call insurance companies on the telephone to verify insurance benefits because most insurers make it EXTREMELY difficult to determine benefits in an automated manner because that makes it easier to bill them. They do everything they can to make it difficult for patients to get coverage and for providers to collect. We're actually working with an AI company to build a tool that uses AI and lots of data to predict with better accuracy benefit coverage. All because insurers want barriers to treatment to lower their costs.
- burnte 2y agoSource is my own lived work experience. In the healthcare companies I've worked in, the size of teams to investigate benefit coverage, to bill, and then to nag insurers to actually pay us works out to roughly 15% of the total staff. This is where _providers_ are about 25% of staff. Add to those salaries the costs of the tools we have to employ to manage it all, track it, and management of all of those folks, and it bloats the cost by 20%. We're actually working with an AI company to build a tool that uses AI and lots of data to predict with better accuracy benefit coverage. All because insurers want barriers to treatment to lower their costs. If we went single payer, we would virtually eliminate benefits investigation teams because Medicare is honestly super easy to determine benefits of a patient unless they're on the private Medicare Advantage plans. We could eliminate the need to work with clearing houses as we'd have one payor, not hundreds of payors each with dozens of plans and single-case agreements. RCM departments would shrink because with one payor, providers wouldn't have to constantly nag payors to actually send the money. The admin overhead is sickening.
- darth_avocado 2y agoAlso, if people get the medical attention they need on time, they’d be more productive and also be more active in the economy. The loss of productivity coming from inadequate healthcare because of insurance coverages is in the order of tens of Billions annually.
- gruez 2y ago>Also, if people get the medical attention they need on time Unclear whether that would bear fruit, given how socialized healthcare systems have a bad reputation of long wait times.
- semi-extrinsic 2y agoI think this is an incorrect impression caused by cherry-picking data. E.g. in the dataset linked below, while some European countries have longer waiting times for elective surgery, they have between 2x and 10x shorter waiting times than the US when it comes to seeing a primary physician. Which is arguably one of the most important metrics for getting people medical attention on time. Furthermore, in many non-US countries you have "controversial" things like emergency contraceptives being prescription free, so people don't even need to see a doctor in the first place. Imagine how much more efficient that is. https://www.statista.com/chart/33079/average-waiting-times-for-a-doctors-appointment/ https://www.statista.com/chart/33079/average-waiting-times-f...
- mike_hearn 2y agoThat page says the lowest waiting times for surgeries are the USA and Switzerland, which has a mostly private healthcare system and private health insurance. It also claims waiting times for a GP are only ten days on average in the UK which doesn't sound right given the difficulty people have even getting an appointment booked at all lately. I wonder how they compute these numbers.
- darth_avocado 2y agoOne thing I don’t like about discourse around healthcare is that we automatically talk about socialized healthcare systems being bad. Asking for more transparency and accountability in insurance companies is not unreasonable. You pay thousands of dollars every year to these conpanies only to have your medical procedure delayed because the insurance doesn’t think it’s necessary. If you can’t set up a system that requires insurance to fulfill their duty, make health insurance non mandatory and set up a public system with more accountability. Right now these companies want to have their cake and eat it too.