Preventive Care, Americans Who Pay No Income Taxes, and the Costs of Keeping One Man Alive
Nice essay on why preventive care (to be greatly encouraged by ObamaCare) will increase national health care spending. (HT to Jason Shafrin.)
Keith Hennessey: Why do so many Americans pay no income taxes? Because of Republican policies.
BusinessWeek parses a $618,616 hospital bill. The patient died.
The studies overwhelmingly show that preventive care does not save money. You are right. Or the link is right.
The BusinessWeek essay is amazing. I admire this woman’s courage, not only to look over 6,000 pages of hospital bills but also to ask whether it was really worth all of the effort to try to extend her husband’s life.
I think most of that money was spent in the week or two before he died.
Hennessey makes a good point and Republicans get no credit for it and rarely claim credit for it. Almost every major tax cut sponsored by Republicans has made the tax code more progressive than it was before, yet the GOP let’s Democrats get away with claiming they are the party of the rich.
The interesting part of that $618,000 in medical care is that a good $200,000 what wasted on administrative overhead. Uwe Reinhardt recently testified before the Senate Finance Committee that Duke University Hospital has 900 beds and 900 billing clerks. I’ve seen reports that most hospitals actually have more overhead then Duke. The health insurance companies with typical medical lose ratios of 75 to 80 percent are just a bad. Next time you’re at your physician’s office, just count how many admins he has. It’s as if every clerk and middle level manager that been fired over the past decade by corporations have ended up getting jobs in the health care industry.
The reason for all those billing clerks is that all too aften the practice of medicine is the art of maximizing against reimbursement formulas.