| I doubt you'll find many other industries that have as many unnecessary employees as you would in healthcare. Given that they're for-profit, they have every incentive to hire as many people as possible to answer phones and create a bureaucratic nest of people who go to work to literally make it hard to use the insurance you're paying for. Compare to car insurance, where many companies tout how "easy" it is to file a claim, and in most cases it is pretty easy to get your car fixed, get a rental car in the meantime, and get back on the road in a few days. Everybody in the process gets paid, you can shop around every 6 months for cheaper rates, etc. By all accounts, car insurance is profitable. If healthcare was made simpler, with standard prices for procedures across all hospital systems and insurance carriers, and actual doctors who aren't of the same caliber of the ones prescribing Viagra from some random site in Albania, we could start to fix the system. As it stands now, and I'm sorry for the people involved who work these jobs, but if health insurance reduced it's bloat of unnecessary workers, many of whom go to work to specifically answer calls from people whose claims are denied, we could lower costs, cover more people's procedures, and keep physician pay the same. As it stands now, nurses do most of the work in the healthcare system, whether it's in the doctor's office or in the hospital, and unless you're in a niche field of nursing, they get paid less than an entry level PHP developer. A nurse can lose their license if they make a horrible mistake at work. Hospitals see nurses are replaceable and that's why many of them burnt out during COVID when staffing ratios were thrown to the wayside, raises and department transfers were halted, and techs and other low-skilled nursing positions were eliminated, increasing the burden on RN's. It's not correct that in order to lower healthcare costs, we have to lower physician pay. Healthcare is just not a business that can be left to the free market. |
https://www.kff.org/report-section/ehbs-2022-section-1-cost-...