Comment by AlienRobot
3 days ago
I have good news! If you move it to the public sector, you will effectively pay doctors less money for the same work. That's because the way it works currently is that the doctors have to deal with private insurance bureaucracy. By freeing them from this responsibility, they have more time to take care of patients, which should effectively gets you more medical bang for your buck.
You're describing the federal system being massively more efficient - which is theoretically possible - but rarely happens in practice.
It seems to me like centralized governments have had a rise that whether impressive or just typical of an average country, was thought to be impossible for them. Couldn't the past performance be down to the absurd costs of data collection and management in the past and the lack of scaling benefit when centralizing gigaflops of secretaries or the costs of doubling a very small number of bytes of information on every household at that time?
The federal system already runs a much more efficient enterprise as evidenced in medicare and medicade since their establishment in the 60s.
It is already established fact that Medicare is more efficient than private insurance. https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/forefront.20110920....
Assuming that your numbers are correct:
You eliminate ~1.2% of total healthcare spending on private insurance profits.
Then you eliminate ~37% of ~14% of ~27% total healthcare spending on insurance labor costs = ~1.5%.
* Article states medicare is ~37% more efficient.
* Insurance companies are required to spend AT LEAST 80% of premiums on actual patient care (~6% of the remaining ~20% are profits - already taken out in the previous ~1.2% of total health care spending).
* ~27% of total US healthcare spending is on private insurance premiums.
You end up with ~2.7% cheaper healthcare in the ABSOLUTE best case.
That's not moving the needle.
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