Showing posts with label inefficiency. Show all posts
Showing posts with label inefficiency. Show all posts

More Government Health Care Facts for Those Who Like the Truth

  August 16, 2009    

So, here are some actual facts to consider. In Britain, which is apparently the most despised example of evil Orwellian government health care that the opponents of government health care can think of, people are free to buy and use private health insurance for private health care. I know quite a few British people who do this. These are not people who make things up.
  • Britain's NHS sees one million people every 36 hours and 93 per cent of patients rate their care as good or excellent.
  • The CIA says that Brits can expect to live longer under government health care than Americans can under the current free market system: http://ff.im/6zU3G
  • Measured as a percentage of GDP, Britain spends about half of what America spends on health care, yet Britain enjoys greater life expectancy, lower infant mortality, lower maternal mortality.
  • My 80 year-old mother lives in Britain and has never experienced age-related government health care restrictions.
  • The World Health Organization ranks Britain's health care as 18th in the world, while the US is in 37th place.
In other words, Britain, along with many other countries, has figured out how to get better health care results while spending a less than America does. Indeed, Spain has even better outcomes than Britain and spends even less.

So, there is no reason that America can't cut medical spending while improving health care. Okay, well there are reasons. I think they are excess profit and inefficiency.

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Health Care Dollars: Got your missing billions right here

  January 16, 2007    

Further evidence today to support my theory that the free market is an inefficient provider of health care. Happened on a short article in today's business section of the Florida Times Union. Just a one page piece about a small local company, E&S, with operations mostly located in Amelia Island and seven employees. What do they do? They work on behalf of hospitals to collect money that insurance companies owe them (and would not pay them without prompting--keeping that money to themselves). E&S has just five clients right now. Pretty small stuff huh?

Well consider this, last year the company identified about $850 million in under-reported claims for its clients. That's right $850 million! For just 5 clients! Using just 7 people! The implications are many and some of them are amazing. The cynic in me wants to buy stock in E&S because you just don't see many business models this good (the company had revenues of about $1 million per employee, taking a 25% cut of the amount collected for clients).

But think of how much waste this implies. There are about 6.000 hospitals in America. Some 3,000 are medium to large hospitals (100 or more beds). There are 900 with over 300 beds. Even if we assume that the 5 clients of E&S each have 4 large hospitals the math is pretty staggering: Over $120,000 in uncollected insurance money per hospital bed. There are about 950,000 hospital beds in American hospitals. Total uncollected insurance money could easily top $100 billion.

What a waste!

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