Obamacare Advisors: Save Money By Eliminating Hippocratic Oath

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I support President Obama's heath care reform initiative because it will literally save this country.

The industry and it's backers are using the same fear tactics they did in 1994to delay the implementation of a the transparent and publicly accountable health care options currently being considered in Congress.

The system is broken, and the GOP is clinging to the status quo even though it clearly excludes tens of millions.

Private-sector insurers go to great lengths to avoid responsibility for sick people, use deliberately incomprehensible documents to mislead consumers about their benefits, and sell "junk" policies that do not cover needed care.

Hospital bills are nearly impossible for patients to understand, which means hospitals can hide improper charges behind obtuse medical terminology and "codes".

These abusers need competition and oversight, not protectionism for their corrupt monopoly.

Total spending in America for health insurance was $2.4 trillion in 2007, or approximately $7900 per person.

In 2006, the six largest insurance companies made $11 billion in profits even after paying for direct health care costs, administrative costs and marketing costs.

Total health care spending represents 17 percent of the nation's gross domestic product.

Medicare has administrative costs far lower (four times lower) than any private health insurance plan.

The potential savings on health insurance paperwork alone, more than $350 billion per year, is enough to provide comprehensive coverage to every uninsured person in America today.
 
DNC said:
http://www.aafp.org/online/etc/medi...stateadvocacy_MedicaidAdministrativeCosts.pdf
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Your link is from 2005

Here is a better link that runs ALL THE NUMBERS


Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

Does Medicare actually have higher administrative costs than private insurers?
By Andrew Gelman on July 6, 2009 9:15 AM * 8 Comments
Greg Mankiw links to an article that illustrates the challenges of interpreting raw numbers causally. This would really be a great example for your introductory statistics or economics classes, because the article, by Robert Book, starts off by identifying a statistical error and then goes on to make a nearly identical error of its own! Fun stuff.
Book sets up the story:

Many advocates . . . claim that a public health plan will save money compared to private health insurance because "everyone knows" that the largest government health program, Medicare, has lower administrative costs than private insurance. . . . Advocates of a public plan assert that Medicare has administrative costs of 3 percent (or 6 to 8 percent if support from other government agencies is included), compared to 14 to 22 percent for private employer-sponsored health insurance . . .
He then points out the problem with this raw comparison:

Medicare patients are by definition elderly, disabled, or patients with end-stage renal disease, and as such have higher average patient care costs, so expressing administrative costs as a percentage of total costs gives a misleading picture of relative efficiency. Administrative costs are incurred primarily on a fixed or per-beneficiary basis; this approach spreads Medicare's costs over a larger base of patient care cost.
Excellent point. Don't forget about the denominator, as we always tell our students.

The next step, I'd think, is to compare costs for different groups of potential patients, characterized by age, health status, and socioeconomic and demographic background variables.

But that's not what Book does--instead he just compares average administrative costs per patient: $509 per primary beneficiary for Medicare, $453 for private insurers. But this can't be right: of course, Medicare patients, who are older, sicker, and are going to the doctor and hospital more often, will have higher administrative costs! It seems silly to jump all over the first set of unadjusted numbers and then take the second set of unadjusted numbers at face value, leading to this claim:

If recent cost history is any guide, switching the more than 200 million Americans with private insurance to a public plan will not save money but will actually increase health care administrative costs by several billion dollars.
I don't buy it--for essentially the same reason that I find Book's first argument persuasive. It would seem to make more sense to compare comparable groups of people. (But see Book's comment below, defending his calculations.)

Disclaimer

I'm no expert in health policy. These are just my impressions as a teacher of statistics. It's great to find such examples that are so relevant to policy. I was surprised to see Mankiw quote the above article without criticism; but I'm pretty sure he's studied these issues in a lot more detail than I have, and so perhaps he has additional knowledge that makes him confident in the substance of Book's reasoning.

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2009/07/does_medicare_a.html
 
You will eventually win this, because there are so many more conservative editorial cartoonists than there are liberals.
 
Fish said:
You will eventually win this, because there are so many more conservative editorial cartoonists than there are liberals.
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Making excuses already? :)

Or could it be, Obamacare stinks and more people are coming to that conclusion as they read what is in the bill?

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Under the current status quo system, administrative costs eat up some 25 to 30 percent of health care costs in America.

We supposedly have wonderful health care benefits (for the rich), but we also seem to have the most waste and inefficiency.

Under attack for reaping windfall profits while raising premiums and cutting benefits during a recession, the private insurance industry has no valid argument for continuing it's monopolistic dominance of the most lucrative market on Earth.

Except for baseless scaremongering (the government will ration health care, you'll be bankrupted with taxes, the feds will pick your doctor, etc.), the only weapon the fat cats of health care have is their bulging war chest.

They're using their millions on two fronts. First, their highly-paid lobbyists are whispering in the ears of every member of Congress, and second, they have mounted a multi-media propaganda campaign designed to frighten the votong public into putting the fear of God into Congress.

Unlike compassionate conservatives who shout about Jesus on Sunday and abandon the poor the rest of the week, I cannot feel it is right for people to go without health care.

I know there are good, deserving people who cannot get insurance, or who cannot afford insurance, and that's what helath care reform is going to redress.
 
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