Reply #2: 50% of every dollar that a hospital gets is spent on [View All]

"administrative overhead" which covers a lot of territory, but mainly means coping with the Byzantine paperwork presented by competing health insurance companies. Just streamlining the paperwork to one form would solve a great deal of the problem driving administrative costs.

Another thing driving costs is the hospitals in the same market, each allied with a different health plan, trying to be all things to all people in that plan, which means a lot of hideously expensive technology is needlessly duplicated. We've overbuilt MRI scanners in this country to the extent that Canada finds it cheaper to send their patients across the border for scans than to build them for their own hospitals.

Even greed pales in comparison to these two things, but the greed of drug companies that advertise their junk directly to patients is not to be underestimated.

A single payer system would end the paperwork nightmare, consolidate services into somewhat more specialized hospitals, and cause drug companies to enter regional bidding for contracts to supply their drugs. Universal coverage would bring the young and relatively healthy into the pool, dropping the overall cost for everyone. Medicaid and Medicare would no longer exist as such, ending even more bureaucracy with its own nightmarish paperwork.

Rationing health care so that only the rich and the well insured can afford it is unconscionably cruel. Ordinary people have been completely priced out of the system, and a severe illness can bankrupt families just from the copays.

Privatization and for profit healthcare can only be an option when illness and injury become consumer decisions; when the rich can luxuriate in multi organ failure needing transplant while the poor make do with a common cold once in a while.