So now I'm reading in the LA Times that the insurance companies are crowing "Hallelujah!" about mandatory insurance requirements, linked with government subsidies for the poor, which means once again, the taxpayers are going to be paying for a bureaucracy to pay a bureaucracy to deny us care.
Additionally, the InsCos are fighting to REDUCE the percentage of costs they pay to 65% from the common 85-90%.
Add their fully inflated "administration costs" which pay the obscene executive salaries, skyscrapers, jets and Las Vegas "conferences" and you're looking at a successful zombie corporation parasitizing the entire country.
So, what a Payout Percentage? It's under the fold...
Payout Percentage is the important fact about increasing insurance efficiency, and thus LOWERING HEALTH CARE COSTS.
Keep it clear in your mind. You give $100 to the bureaucrats, they give less to the careprovider. The reason you don't give it directly to the care provider is that regulation costs money, and without it, people cheat. So Medicare has less cheating, because it's bigger. Bigger is better, and uniformity, as in laws and regulation is better than private companies held offshore and in Swiss banks.
Let me start by saying that I bristle when I hear plans to save money by paying doctors less, while we ignore how much we are spending to keep insurance executives richer and richer.
Doctors provide the actual care.
Hospitals do a lot of gaming of the system. Like many of you, I've explored deep into the sytem, and I know about bundling, and cost-shifting.
"We need to bundle payments so you aren’t paid for every single treatment you offer a patient with a chronic condition like diabetes, but instead are paid for how you treat the overall disease ..... We need to give doctors bonuses for good health outcomes – so that we are not promoting just more treatment, but better care.... [Obama]"
But that isn't what payout percentage is about. Payout percentage measures the bureaucratic efficiency (Bill Gates called it "friction") of the insurance company or government agency that pays the doctor or hospital for the services delivered.
The figures are known: Medicare pays out 96%, or 96 cents on the dollar. Private insurance companies average ~78%. Why?
Because Medicare bureaucrats have limited salaries, and Medicare has no stockholders to pressure them to cheat.
Don't be fooled. Medicare for all would save enough money to pay for health care for everyone, and at the same time rid us of employer insurance costs, insurance companies would shrink, and more of our TOTAL money would go to pay doctors and hospitals. Do the math. Saving 18% of 1/6th of the national expenditure onhealth care would pay for the actual 15 million people now totally uncovered. (I'm using the conservative figures. Even those figures work.)
We'd have the Medicaid funds to work with, the emergency room funds, the savings from preventive care, the bureaucratic savings, the workdays lost, the competitive margin for industry...on and on. It's a massive win to go to single payer.