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.
Are salaries the only source of income that they derive from the medical industry? My doctor is a part owner of his provider network which also is the insurer.
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.
https://www.beckersasc.com/benchmarking/how-physician-pay-in...