Comment by tptacek
3 days ago
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.
Healthcare here isn't 4x the price because of doctor costs, either.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/08/04/doctor-pa... / https://archive.is/ZBRMx
> Polyakova and her collaborators find doctor pay consumes only 8.6 percent of overall health spending. It grew a bit faster than inflation over the time period studied, but much slower than overall health-care costs.
> “People have a narrative that physician earnings is one of the main drivers of high health-care costs in the U.S.,” Polyakova told us. “It is kind of hard to support this narrative if ultimately physicians earn less than 10 percent of national health-care expenditures.”
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