Administrative costs, marketing and profits account for 22 to 33 percent of the U.S. healthcare dollar. By contrast, overhead costs in single-payer systems (including Medicare) typically are 3 percent.
In America's for-profit private insurance healthcare system, medical technicians must contend with hundreds of different forms, billing procedures, regulations and requirements from hundreds of insurance companies; U.S. healthcare companies spend money for advertising and marketing; and, the U.S. healthcare system is based on profit. Since 1970, the number of medical doctors in the United States has increased 40 percent, while the number of medical administrators has increased almost 3,000 percent.
We are paying for a massive, inefficient bureaucracy. The increasing cost of prescription drugs also is increasing the healthcare bill, and U.S. drug costs are the highest in the world; Americans pay 30 percent to 80 percent more for prescription drugs than citizens of any other country.
You might think that this excess money goes into developing new drugs, but you would be wrong: Only 13 percent of drug costs go to research and development, and little of that goes for pioneering new drugs to deal with life-threatening conditions; 51 percent goes to marketing, administration and profits.
IMHO, we can and will implement universal healthcare in this country - I just hope that it is single-payer or some type of system that gets the middlemen (read insurance companies) out of the picture.
BTW - Single payer is not socialized medicine. Medicare is a single-payer system -- a very popular one, by the way -- and single-payer systems such as Medicare do not employ any doctors or own any hospitals or medical facilities.
Peace
