>He was a work comp claim administrator - in the US, they are some of the worst people on the planet.
Whoah now, don't talk about my dad like that! In all seriousness though, my dad said that all the places he worked at over the years generally accepted over 99% of the claims they received.
My dad did develop a visceral hatred for chiropractors over the course of his career though.
Workman’s comp in Canada typically takes over seven years to process and never actually compensated you, it’s always a fraction of what you’d need to even make up for lost income
In a discussion around worker's comp claims it would be about the chiropractor's who make all their money from worker's comp claims and accident settlements. Every person who walks in that door will need unending treatment at the chiropractor. They walk hand in hand with the ambulance chasing lawyers.
For some people this is their only experience with a lawyer and chiropractor might be when someone walks in, "slips" in their store, and they get sued. The chiropractor is one method the lawyer uses to run up the total. It's always a back pain that can never be fully diagnosed or treated.
Over the years, the chiropractic field as a whole has backed off from curing everything to being split between something in the neighborhood of a massage including joint mobility (which is fine), and the fraud.
Some Chiropractors and their patients are under the impression that actual diseases and injuries can be cured by performing the manual adjustments of the body, which leads to people dying of untreated cancer, or orthopedic injuries being aggravated instead of treated properly. Not to say that there aren’t good Chiropractors who recognize their limits, but they all tend to get painted with the same brush.
Because of the countless times he had to deal with claimants going to the chiropractor and the chiropractor claiming that in order to treat their injury they need to come in three times a week for the next 20 years. I exaggerate but there are plenty of dishonest chiropractors trying to milk everything they can out of worker's comp insurance, even if it is of little to no benefit to the patient.
Chiropractic is a pseudoscience without any provable benefits. At best its placebo, at worst you die from it. It's literally a big scam made by a serial snake oil salesman, that has embedded itself in our health systems.
IIRC about 40 percent of all medical expenses are administrative costs and about 20 percent is drug costs. Improving those could drop healthcare costs by nearly half, without lowering healthcare salaries.
To lower medical salaries, we need to address (a) the AMA acting as a cartel, (b) residency slots being paid for by Medicare and being limited, and (c) crippling student debt problems. As an example, nurse practitioner salaries have dropped as supply has increased.
Total per capita healthcare spend in the US is something like $13k, so yeah, much closer to 25% than 60%.
Also, you have to be careful about how you account for “administrative costs”. Medicare has low “administrative costs” but correspondingly high rates of fraud vs. a typical private insurer who has the incentive to spend more looking for it—administrative costs.
Huh, the numbers I’ve seen are much higher than that. 18% for prescription drugs [1], ~6% for retail drugs [1], and 34% for admin costs depending on how it’s accounted for [2]. A lot of places don’t seem to account for insurance related costs (billing/coding/etc.) in administrative costs, which may be the source of the difference.
Research shows that nurses have outcomes comparable to do those of doctors. It's not 10x as hard as SWE, don't buy into that. Plus, thats irrelevant, doctors supply is limited artificially and for no good reasons. The main culprit of high costs are is the insurance companies greed, but doctors are far from being blameless.
In the UK the government both limits the supply of doctors and manages a fairly cheap National Health Service. How? It is rationed by queuing and achieves poor medical outcomes.
I don't think any country has a healthcare system privatized to a higher degree than Switzerland? Yet they still manage to spend quite a bit less per capita than the US.
Rather than it being greediness by a class of individuals, in my view, it is that capitalism rewards greediness, and sometimes it obligates you to be greedy when you are just an employee or selling a service. People are inserted in a system composed by many layers that incentivize and obligate greediness.
Whoah now, don't talk about my dad like that! In all seriousness though, my dad said that all the places he worked at over the years generally accepted over 99% of the claims they received.
My dad did develop a visceral hatred for chiropractors over the course of his career though.