Huge Administrative Waste Makes Clear For-Profit Insurance Is 'Actually Very Bad': Analysis
Huge Administrative Waste Makes Clear For-Profit Insurance Is 'Actually Very Bad': Analysis
"It is totally fair for people to identify private insurers as the key bad actor in our current system," writes Matt Bruenig of the People's Policy Project. "The quicker we nationalize health insurance, the better."
For-profit insurance has been painfully and obviously "very bad" since before I existed. No "actually" needed. This is common knowledge.
Now what are we going to do about it?
Keep the pressure up I guess? Probably a combination of on lawmakers and insurance companies, why not big pharma while we're at it?
It's useful to precise about exactly why it's bad. The idea that capitalism breeds efficiency is baked into the American psyche at this point. But in this case it's literally the opposite of the truth.
This isn't like a highly trained transplant surgeon demanding a salary of 800k instead of 600k. No health care is delivered by an insurance company.
Every dollar earned in profit by a health insurance company is a dollar that was spent on health care for which no health care was delivered. They are literally just inefficiency in the system.
Being bad is one thing, but a lot of people say "Well of course people think it's bad. It's not handing out money to people willy-nilly, so people hate it". Some people would rather have bad things that are efficient with money (because if you have a lot of money, you can solve the problem).
Being financially inefficient may get some people to look into it and change their tune.
Going from...
I spend more money and get what I want, poor people just need to work harder and be smarter with their money.
To...
Why am I paying more money for bureaucracy when I could be paying less money for less bureaucracy? I don't care if more people get help...I just want to be paying less.
Of course, some people would rather pay more for more red tape because they really hate the idea of poorer people having access to the things they have. But some people are not that bad.
DUH
DUH
It’s not waste. It’s theft. From the point of view of the people doing the administrating, the money they’re taking out is a goal, not a wastefulness.
It’s the exact same thing the music industry does to artists, or the “defense” industry does to the taxpayers. It looks wasteful if you think of it as trying to accomplish some goal other than enriching the people doing it, but that is exactly the goal, so it’s working perfectly.
Compare the health care spending per capita of industrialized countries:
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-spending-u-s-compare-countries/
The US spends $12,555 per capita (per 2022). To bring us in line with other industrialized countries, we would need to cut that number in half.
Compare to the number cited in the article:
To get your head around why this is, think for a second about what happens to every $100 you give to a private insurance company. According to the most exhaustive study on this question in the U.S.—the CBO single-payer study from 2020—the first thing that happens is that $16 of those dollars are taken by the insurance company. From there, the insurer gives the remaining $84 to a hospital to reimburse them for services. That hospital then takes another $15.96 (19% of its revenue) for administration, meaning that only $68.04 of the original $100 actually goes to providing care.
In a single-payer system, the path of that $100 looks a lot different. Rather than take $16 for insurance administration, the public insurer would only take $1.60. And rather than take $15.96 of the remaining money for hospital administration, the hospital would only take $11.80 (12% of its revenue), meaning that $86.60 of the original $100 actually goes to providing care.
Administration overhead fixes wouldn't quite get all of the difference, but it is a huge chunk of it. That on top of Medicare being able to negotiate better rates would likely do the rest.
So, yeah, do universal Medicare. That alone takes care of almost the entire problem.
We need more studies and more proof of this.
We need more news articles repeating the studies and proof.
Not fewer.
I can tell you we need fewer health insurance c-suites.
Wake me up when you have some actual news
Go figure. Big business guilty of the issues everyone claimed Big Government would have, except big business was supposed ro be so much better because “privatization” and “efficiency”.
Guess it turns out that when an industry captures a sector by being in effect mandatory to use those services they don’t give a shit about being efficient and they still get to make a profit. They’re burning everyone else’s money. So medical insurance costs go up. What are you gonna do? Not get medical treatment? Oh, wait…
Government can be inefficient AF, but it doesn’t need to make a profit on top of that inefficiency.
every large organization is inefficient, anyone who has worked at a huge company knows this. This is just another capitalist myth that happens to keep economic control in private hands where the wealthy get more votes than the poor, as opposed to public hands where (in theory) votes are equal.
Insurance company execs literally salivating at the thought of being able to perform mass layoffs and leave "an algo" in charge all in the name of reducing overhead.
Ya don’t say.
No shit!
wonder what donvict's 'efficiency expert' has to say about that?
probably some bullshit about needing to move seniors on medicare over to for profit 'advantage' plans.
probably some bullshit about needing to move seniors on medicare over to for profit 'advantage' plans.
Not until after he buys CVS and rebrands it as PharMaX, with all-new "dealership-free" insurance plans that use AI to streamline the claims denial process.
Honestly, it would be most efficient just to grind everyone over 70 into mulch. The years spent slowly siphoning their life savings while they just sit around not being hardcore workers are complete waste. Accelerate the process, transfer the wealth, so the next generation can spend it on new cars and electronic baubles: old people don't spend enough money, and what they do spend is all government-subsidized healthcare.
/s
can we start at the top of the hill, then have a change of heart as we clean the orange goo out of the mulcher?
Er, huge administrative waste is what makes universal healthcare nearly unworkable too lol
In Canada the only reason that our administrative waste has increased is because right wing Conservatives have begun to privatize so many of our public healthcare services.
To date the only provincial leadership that has moved to reverse this trend is Manitoba's premier, Wab Kinew, who recently announced a ban on "public health providers from signing new contracts with private nursing agencies".