> According to Reinhardt, doctors' take-home pay (that is, income minus expenses) amounts to only about 1 percent of overall health care spending, or about $26 billion.
This doesn't make any sense whatsoever. So where is all that money going?
> That's a drop in the ocean compared with overhead for insurance companies, billing expenses for doctors' offices, and advertising for drug companies.
There is absolutely no way those things add up to 99% of medical expenses.
In every field most of the money goes to pay people. So who is making the money? Is Reinhardt excluding specialists perhaps?
He left out a lot of other stuff. Hospital rooms. Nurses, lab technicians, all the other staff at the hospital/clinic/doctor's office. Other overhead (office rent, equipment leases) on and on.
Liability insurance premiums for malpractice insurance. A huge cost. Enough to drive doctors away from some specialties, such as obstetrics.
There's some overhead in insurance company billing operations, but I've not seen any good evidence that the government can do it for less.
I was curious, so I asked my dad what it was on average. He said that it was about $30,000-$40,000 per year per doctor, but that is highly dependent on the specialty. For surgeons, probably close to $100,000 a year, while probably close to nothing for psychiatrists.
》 I've not seen any good evidence that the government can do it for less.
France? Any argument against single payer has to cope with the multitude of countries which provide health care better and cheaper to all of their citizens.
I believe it. The administrative overhead is huge in private health care. I did some contract work for a doctor a few years ago and it was amazing that this small office had a staff of 8 or 9 people basically devoted to moving around paper files, making copies, making phone calls for prescriptions, etc. This small general practice office had probably 12 employee's total but only 2 doctors. So using this as an example that's an administrative/care ratio of 6 to 1. When you widen it out to tests, drugs, etc the actual number of people directly giving care to a patient is tiny compared to all the supporting elements.
It isn't 1% of my total bill, but I did pay out of pocket for an outpatient surgery several years ago. The doctor charged me $500, including all follow-up office visits, whereas the hospital charged me close to $5000. Doctors are not the ones to blame about high medical costs.
This doesn't make any sense whatsoever. So where is all that money going?
> That's a drop in the ocean compared with overhead for insurance companies, billing expenses for doctors' offices, and advertising for drug companies.
There is absolutely no way those things add up to 99% of medical expenses.
In every field most of the money goes to pay people. So who is making the money? Is Reinhardt excluding specialists perhaps?