The Best Health ‘Reform’ Money Can Buy

According to the Health and Human Service’s department’s National Health Expenditures report, private insurers will pay out $854 billion in medical claims for health insurance policyholders this year [See National Health Expenditures and Selected Economic Indicators table 1]. That represents about one-third of the nation’s estimated $2.5-trillion medical care bill for this year [See National Health Expenditures and Selected Economic Indicators table 1]. But that’s not the whole story.

The premiums paid for those claims payments will total $1.2 trillion [See National Health Expenditures Aggregate table 1], which includes $179 billion in “administrative” costs (21 percent or over $1 out of every $5 dollars spent on health care) [See National Health Expenditure Amounts table 2] and another 150 billion in profits (a tidy 15 percent return). That is money that was paid out in premiums by individuals and by employers  (who every year are shifting more of the cost of health coverage onto employees).

A big part of that $179 billion you and your employer pay for insurance company “administrative expenses” goes to fund private “death panels” whose job, as insurance company whistleblower Wendell Potter has testified in Congress, to deny coverage to sick policyholders.

And that $179 billion wasted on administration (Medicare, a federally-run program, only devotes 4 percent of costs to administration by way of comparison), isn’t all. Doctors, hospitals and pharmacies also spend a similar sum on administrative expenses, much of it devoted to fighting to get paid by those same insurance companies.

Read the rest.

Source: The Public Record

Related:

CDC National Center for Health Statistics:

44.9 Million Without Health Insurance in First Quarter of 2009
8.2% of children are uninsured, new report finds.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau | The 2009 Statistical Abstract