Drum: Underground Cost of Health Care—Noted
The last time I went into my children’s pediatricians’ office, they had two doctors, three nurses, and four papers shufflers there—and the paper shufflers were mirrored by four more paper shufflers at the insurance companies, all trying to keep whatever the pediatricians were deciding to do from being covered by insurance. But, as Kevin Drum rightly points out, that is not the only overhead of our insane healthcare financing system. We patients spend a lot of time working for the insurance companies for free as well: Kevin Drum: How Big Is the Underground Cost of Health Care? https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/07/how-big-is-the-underground-cost-of-health-care/: ‘the health care system... massively inefficient and prone to errors, most of which end up falling on patients to fix... on hold making appointments... medication errors... arguing with insurance companies... back-and-forth... telling doctors what some other doctor said... miscommunications caused by the fact that doctors typically know nothing about the actual operation of their own industry. Etc.... elements of the health care system that are outsourced to patients themselves. It never gets accounted for, but for all practical purposes the health care system relies on the unpaid labor of patients... I have never seen a study that tries to compare this underground cost among countries... .#noted #2020-08-15
