Comment by ceejayoz
3 days ago
> 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.”
Exactly. Even if you forced doctor compensation down to the level of other countries, that's, what, a 6% overall reduction, at best? Wow, so now when you get a surprise bill for $5000, it'll instead be $4700 instead! Hooray! We did it, Reddit/HN!
Does anyone think American healthcare was thereby fixed? I don't!
Now, FWIW, I'm happy to accept that US doctors are overpaid, and that there are feasible ways to make progress on that front. It's an important conversation to have. But it has virtually nothing to do with what makes US healthcare so brutal and kafkaesque.
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