[kingsuper20]

I'm not much for the genius of government to correct things, but you really can make a strong argument for the standardization to a small number of insurance plans with stated rules, third party arbitration, etc.

You would definitely see more of a free market by producing fungible products with (hopefully) a bit less obfuscation. The insurance companies would still do their best to not cover a claim of course, so this is only a partial solution.

One nice side effect is that it's a small nudge in an organically 'designed' system rather than the inevitable chaos by changing the whole machine at once.

If you believe in single payer healthcare, it would be easy to attach redesigns in cash inflow to a set of standardized policies.

I've always admired the size of office staff in a doctor's office, no doubt mostly due to the complexity of the cashflow in the backend. Perhaps simplification of billing would result in less bookkeeping and more caregivers.

[creaghpatr]

Yes, I'm bullish on the potential savings of standardization, of course in healthcare the devil is in the details so it matters what they mean by those things.

[kingsuper20]

Exactly right. I hate even having an opinion on this kind of thing. Software people tend to be filled with concepts on the way-things-oughtta-be-why-are-people-so-stupid usually without any domain knowledge and it's good to watch out for that tendency.

Medicine is like tax law, there's a whole lot to it. Some historical, some arbitrary, some greed, some altruism.