That’s a lot of research you’ve done to basically prove my point. All those administrative costs in the US amount to 8.3% of the total healthcare spend. Now tell me again how they’re the main cause of these crazy healthcare bills?
1. 8% is a significantly higher number than administrative costs anywhere else. This 8% is also clearly the least useful cost, and has virtually nothing to do with patient care. The fact that Medicare, dealing with the same hospitals and doctors, keeps admin costs to 1%, tells you what a boondoggle it is. The other exorbitant markups at least serve some purpose.
2. I don't know if you know how the US system works. There are no "real" sums of money involved anywhere.
It's been a while, so I've forgotten the exact numbers, but:
2 years ago, I had 2 ER visits and was then hospitalised for 2 days, during which time I received no surgery or treatment, or even a diagnosis (by luck and coincidence, I had figured out what the infection was, and it was confirmed 2 weeks after discharge). I did have a CT scan, some saline drip, and many mostly-routine blood tests, apart from the stay itself. By insane luck, I was covered by insurance despite being between jobs (a loophole that I learnt was removed next year).
I spent, out of pocket, about $1200 split over 4 bills. Now the fun part:
The bills nominally added up to some 10 or 20k. In theory, insurance spent 9 or 19k to cover me.
In reality, the insurers spent about 2 or 4000. Because the nominal bill amount is a number plucked from thin air. One of the insurance companies gave me the fine print, which suggested that was the ratio of my spending to theirs.
It's a madhouse system. And the reason it can function like this is because of the intervening layer of insurance and the associated bureacracy, which means that costs and prices are totally meaningless. It may not be directly in the insurers' interests for these prices to stay high, but it is in their interests for the prices and costs to be as opaque and meaningless as possible.
3. You know how I said it may not be in their interest for costs to stay high? Well, they do have one reason for it:
8% of 5 trillion sounds better than 8% of 3.5 trillion!
Once the mob decides someone/something is the bad guy then everything is the fault of that bad guy.
give it a rest cmon