Comment by ceejayoz
3 days ago
> look at combined hospital and physician expenses compared to insurer expenses; it's pretty black-and-white
I mean, yeah. They're doing all the work.
3 days ago
> look at combined hospital and physician expenses compared to insurer expenses; it's pretty black-and-white
I mean, yeah. They're doing all the work.
And billing us 4x more for it than Europeans, and, further: a lot of that work is wasteful and unnecessary (see: spinal fusion surgeries, back imaging). There were more MRI machines in Massachusetts in 2023 than there where in all of Canada.
No, they're billing insurance companies that much. For-profit insurance companies are incentivized to drive up the cost of care because of the cap on their profit margins. More expensive care equals more profits as a bigger pie means a bigger profit even if the percentage remains the same.
Medicare's rates are about a half to a third of what private insurers have managed to negotiate. Funny how that works.
Doctors are not the problem with American health care, for-profit insurance is.
> And billing us 4x more for it than Europeans
In part, because dealing with insurers is immensely costly in staff and time.
(Other parts include the immense cost of twelve years of secondary education here; a million bucks in student loans isn't uncommon.)
> a lot of that work is wasteful and unnecessary (see: spinal fusion surgeries, back imaging)
Which makes the "insurers are there to reduce waste!" argument especially tough to stomach.
Doctors don't make 4x more here than in Germany because of insurance costs.
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