The administrative burden of health care

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Good article in the NY Times on how insurance companies are killing people. High quality health care is health care where you don’t have a $30 million dollar/year health insurance CEO between you and your doctor.

Opinion | The Overlooked Reason Our Health Care System Crushes Patients

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[steve203]

But, we are assured, the problem is the “big, bad, burdensome, intrusive, one-size-fits-all, communistical, socialistical, swampy, gummit”, not those hard working “JCs”, that “gets between the patient and his doctor.”

Fundamental difference in world view, that has been cultivated for forty years.

Steve

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Yep. The reason health care for white people sucks, is because blacks and Hispanics are getting too much of it for free.

What's the source of "the 20% that Medicare doesn't pay?"

I’ve been reading a book by Thom Hartmann “The Hidden History of American Healthcare” where he describes the source of “the 20% that Medicare doesn’t pay”. {{ The early opposition, more than 100 years ago, to a national healthcare system came from southern white congressmen (they were all men) and senators who didn’t want even the possibility that Black people could benefit, health-wise, from white people’s tax dollars. (This thinking apparently still motivates many white Southern politicians.) …

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From the article:

{{ Administrative burden can work as a technique to keep costs down. However, part of the problem, Dr. Friedson said, is that we don’t count the burden to patients, and so it doesn’t factor into policy decisions. There’s nobody measuring the time spent on the phone plus lost wages plus complications from delayed care for every single patient in the United States. }}

I’m doing that. Back when I had a for-profit health plan, if the mother ffing insurance company didn’t solve my problem with the first phone call, I filed a complaint with the State Health Insurance Commissioner.

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