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Awful_Things
Guest
And I find this response to be right out of the liberal blog handbook, which is to minimize another’s viewpoints by dismissing them as talking points.I read your post and I find a whole raft of unsupported assertions right out of talk-radio talking points.
Let’s take a look.I think you will find through investigation that, very few of the reasons you cite have any meaningful impact on health care costs.
You are right in that you didn’t mention greed specifically. I was reacting to a more general accusation, which isn’t fair to your point. I’ll address cutting edge technology below, though I’m more than willing to admit it is a factor. The uninsured using emergency rooms is a problem, but I think it is a problem caused by the factors below, which has pushed insurance out of their reach, so this is not a contradiction, but indication of a spiral. This spiraling effect will be important later when you are addressing defensive medicine.Also I’m afraid you are quite mistaken about my assessment of the reasons for the extraordinarily high cost of health care. It isn’t greed on anyone’s part. It is primarily a result of two factors, cutting edge technology and the large number of uninsured people who receive their primary care through emergency rooms.
I don’t believe I ever said wage controls lasted beyond that. My point was that the demand for employer-provided health care did. There is no noticeable decline in it after wage controls, which were irresponsible, disappeared.You are correct that businesses opted to offer health insurance to their employees because of a wage freeze by the government, what you fail to mention is that the wage freeze was a measure the government enacted to fight World War II. Even then the wage controls were removed shortly after WWII (60 years ago!!).
That dog will continue to hunt. Not only is the 5% estimate, itself, an example of hidden administrative costs, but any reduction is also the result of sloppy distribution of funds, which further burdens tax payers.The “administration and paperwork” is a bit of a red herring as well. Both Medicaid and Medicare have much lower administrative costs. Only about 5% of Medicare spending is administrative compared to 9% for private insurers (17% if you count marketing and commision costs!!). So that dog won’t hunt.
cahi.org/cahi_contents/resources/pdf/CAHI_Medicare_Admin_Final_Publication.pdf
I’m surprised you’ve never heard of it, since it pops up so much in analysis. The last book I read on the subject was Medicare Myths by Dennis Furlong, the former New Brunswick Health Minister, who writes about the Canadian system.“Overuse of insurance”, I’ve never heard this one. I’ve heard that ER use is too high, generally because of the number of people who use the ER as their PCP and because insured folks often don’t find the hours of their PCP convenient to meet their “urgentish” needs. My understanding was that the rise of the “Doc-in-a-box” had largely addressed the second groups, but the first group was still a problem. Given the constant preaching about preventative care being cheaper than treatment, I’d be surprised if insurers actually wanted their insureds to visit the doctor’s less often. If you have any data on this I’d love to see it.
The 2% is a reference to increased costs due to insurance increases, themselves, and does not take into consideration the overuse of all that expensive new technology you mentioned earlier. While anecdotal evidence only goes so far, I’ve had my share of it from friends who are X-Ray technicians at both of our local hospitals and attest to the rise just over the last decade in such technology for very frivolous reasons by doctors who are consistently overly cautious.“Fear of malpractice suits” Oh! I remember this one! This was the one the Malpractice Insurers trotted out a few years ago when that wave of “tort reform” swept the US. Well, the cost of insurance certainly isn’t a issue accounting for less than 2% of health care costs in the US.
makethemaccountable.com/myth/RisingCostOfMedicalMalpracticeInsurance.htm
It doesn’t explain it by itself, especially as this article does not tell us if that is a consistent number or if it is the average over a number of years, which might mean that an increase is visible with a year-to-year breakdown. In addition, we should be looking at increases over extended periods of time. It might be more realistic to look at a broader period than year-to-year. As a parent can attest, one sees the growth more realistically when you measure your kids once a year, not once a week.As far as defensive medicine, the absolute highest estimate I’ve ever seen is that $210B (out of total spend of $2.1T) is spent on defensive medicine, which would account for ~10% of spending, but doesn’t explain the year over year increases at all.
blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2008/04/wasted-medical.html