Much the same as public schools or every government agency for that matter.
Healthcare is no different than anything else.
The more government involvement you have, the more expensive it gets.
One pic (graphic) worth a thousand words.
It would be interesting to see a similar plot for faculty and administrators at universities.
Among other things, anytime any student faction get its collective panties in a wad over some supposed injustice (currently - bathroom designations), the immediate response of those in charge is usually to institute some new office (”Office of Transgendered Affairs”), and then to appoint a dean, an associate dean, and two assistant deans (each with their own secretary) to deal with the issue.
Well there’s yer problem!
The public employee unions have argued for years that we need single payer because we wouldn’t have to pay those high private insurance executive salaries. They want those high salaries themselves, along with taxpayer backed pensions.
That’s really not the only problem.
Bureaucracy is always expensive.
My former employer once hired a firm to study our timesheet system and projects and put a price on them. It turned out to cost more to track hours than the total cost benefit to any project.
We abandoned filling out timesheets, because it was a waste of money.
I wish my current employer would do this too.
After getting kicked of my insurance plan for the second time in 12 months (I belonged to one of those bankrupt state co-ops), I know need to find another plan. I am expecting to be totally raped by the few crony-capitalist health insurers still playing the Obamacare game.
Now I am finding that health insurance is being sold by financial brokers - I’m attending a seminar today.
Just another useless layer in our extremely complex, government-run, fascist health care system.
You don't buy your car insurance from your boss... or homeowners insurance... why should you buy health insurance?
This took the marketplace out of the equation.
And worse was ‘co-pays’. No matter where you go, or what they charge, you only pay the same price- your ‘co-pay’
So why bother to shop around?
I had a babysitter who needed to go see a doctor for a bad scratch (literally, just a scratch) that had gotten a little red and infected.
The Doctor walked in, took a look, and walked out telling the nurse what to prescribe. He was in the room for less than 10 seconds. He charged $400. When I called to help her out (and complain) they said it was not the length of time but the QUALITY of the service...
Then, when she went to get her anti-biotic they filled her prescription with some brand name drug- and wanted to charge her ANOTHER $400. When I told them she had no insurance, they re-filled the prescription with a generic drug (same thing- only generic brand) and charged $20.
Only in a screwed up system where you don't see the costs are they able to charge either $400 or $20 for the same thing.
And last but not least, is the endless government regulations that FORCE the insurance companies to cover things the government mandates they must cover.
For example, imagine you made a drug that allowed men to have sex... Do you think there might be a market for that? A BIG market? And maybe it would be possible to mass-produce it for pennies?
Or is it more profitable for them to get the government to tell insurance companies they MUST cover the cost of viagra, so they can sell it for $10 a pill.
When I worked for a public employee union I found that they believed that the people they represented, uneducated pencil pushers that enrolled people into MediCal, deserved more pay than the doctors. They had as much respect for the doctors as they did taxpayers, which is not much.
One of the stupidest things ever done was to require that physicians, or someone they hire, minutely classify everything the physician (and other health-care providers, e.g. nurse-practitioners, licensed psychologists) does in reports (called “claims”) sent to non-physician bureaucrats in order for the physician to be paid, and to have non-physicians second-guess physicians in deciding whether and how much to pay them for their services. Supposedly this “controls costs”, but actually it only controls payments to physicians, while creating needless costs in the form of administrative overhead.
Naturally, Obamacare made this aspect of health-care provision even worse, by requiring everyone to use the even finer classification scheme provided by ICD-10, adding new costs for training all the bureaucrats and “medical billing professionals” — yes, that is the term — in the new classification scheme, which by its nature will waste even more time and cost even more to use than the old ICD-9 classification scheme.
If that graph were not the truth unemployment in Pittsburgh would be at least 35%.
That medical costs got absurdly ridiculous during the First Rapist's presidency is a total coincidence.
Yep.
Total coincidence!
It’s not so much the growth in the number of administrators that’s the problem as it is the lack of growth in the number of physicians.
That graph is not really informative because it’s stated in percent growth and you don’t know what the beginning and ending levels are. If you could find a chart that shows real numbers of physicians and administrators it would be more informative.