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To: kaila
People with no insurance would not be able to afford to pay for their time. Nurses and physicians are not going to work for less, it is stressful and backbreaking work.

This reminds me of an astute observation I heard from a management consultant who was explaining why it's so hard for governments to keep highways in good condition:

"It's because people are willing to pay their auto mechanics a lot more than they're willing to pay their highway engineers."

Take your financial figures at face value. Put five doctors and ten nurses in a room for ten hours to do a surgery, and you've got a base salary cost of less than $10,000. Even if you triple that and then add $25,000 in ancillary costs, you're potentially looking at less than $60,000 in actual costs for the procedure.

It's easy to say "people with no insurance would be able to afford to pay for their time," but that's exactly what they're doing anyway. The last monthly premium I was quoted for a personal "silver" level medical plan was about $900 with a $2,500 annual deductible ... which means I'm paying $10,800 in premiums every year and $2,500 in deductibles for a plan that only covers 70% of the medical costs anyway. So it would actually be CHEAPER to pay directly even for many expensive medical procedures on an as-needed basis.

41 posted on 10/17/2019 12:13:51 PM PDT by Alberta's Child ("Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave." -- Frederick Douglass)
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To: Alberta's Child

I simplified things. That procedure is not just the doctors and nurses time. It is the housecleaner, the sterilization techs, the gowns, the equipment, the meds. No one is looking at administrative costs. When I started nursing in the 1980s, administration was very lean. It now has gotten so large it is suffocating the front line workers. Administrative costs have increased due to the mandates Medicare puts on the system. Even if you have private insurance, and do not have Medicare, their mandates still affect everyone. I never realized the influence Medicare had on my private health insurance until I worked in the administrative end. I am now retired, but my job was not needed in the grand scheme of things, and had around 30 employees. All the while the front line staff was working short. That was just one department. Nothing is going to change until we start getting rid of the huge overhead that admin costs the system.


43 posted on 10/17/2019 12:24:22 PM PDT by kaila
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