Comment by ceejayoz
3 days ago
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.
Now do the math on how much you'd save if you zeroed out health insurance costs.
Does that include the artificially bloated cost of care (compared to e.g. Medicare), the costs of Medicare Part D fraud, and the costs of having care denied and delayed (2–3x the claim denial rate of Medicare) or just the premiums?
Last time we did this song and dance you doubled down on incorrect assumptions about how Medicare functions. So, no, it's not likely I'll come to the same conclusions as you.
2 replies →