rayjay
non sequitur
?
Not at all.
I'm pointing out that fiddling around the margins on what insurance delivery can cost isn't going to have a significant out come.
The US system is almost twice as large a factor in your entire economy as other western democracies. And the most striking difference is that you have an insurance industry that, through increasing complexity drives up the basic cost of delivering health care enormously. And provides nothing of value.
The US health insurance industry likes to point out that it works on small profit margins. 4 to 6%. If it were an efficient industry, this would mean that all the competition in the world could only drive costs down by some factor of the profit margin.
But it is an enormously inefficient beast with enormous staffs and outsized executive compensations. All based upon the simple task of taking money from insurance premiums and paying out claims.
Profit is made by paying out fewer claims than premiums taken in (plus any investment income) . Which in the US means insurers are stingy about payments.
Single payer systems eliminate most of the overhead and eliminate overheads for employers and hospitals.... they immediately have a cost delivery advantage.
But so far, the debate in the US seems to be about fine tuning the insurance industry and incentives around the insurance industry rather than just admitting the whole insurance system is fundamentally ineffective and inefficient.
And moving on from it to a system where health care expenditure isn't on administration but actual health care.
Imagine if a company could get rid of most of its staff handling their health insurance benefits programs, where hospitals could stream line their accounting department because the complexity of dealing with dozens if not hundreds of different insurance companies would be ended, and where the administrators of medicare for all could easily manage the program with fewer people because their job would not be denying claims to increase profits.