The amount of wasteful overhead in the American "healthcare" system never fails to shock me. The last two companies I've worked for (one a self-insured non-profit, the current a "conventionally"-insured for-profit) have both, coincidentally, had ~500 employees, and each dedicated about one-and-a-half full-time positions to administering their healthcare plans. Now scale that up across every company in the country: it's... Insane.
Forget any of the squishy humanitarian impulses behind "socializing" medicine; eliminating all that un-productive labor would be of immense economic benefit.
(Health-plan administrative cost is a moat which advantages large businesses to the detriment of small. That goes some way to explaining why an economic-efficiency / dynamism argument has never gained traction in American political discourse.)
Right, it’s so bad that if we Did A Socialism and somehow had the worst cost outcome for such a move on the planet such that our direct healthcare spending remained identical(ly crazy-high)… it’d still be a win because of the huge drag on the rest of the economy and our QOL the current system imposes in indirect costs.
Forget any of the squishy humanitarian impulses behind "socializing" medicine; eliminating all that un-productive labor would be of immense economic benefit.
(Health-plan administrative cost is a moat which advantages large businesses to the detriment of small. That goes some way to explaining why an economic-efficiency / dynamism argument has never gained traction in American political discourse.)