alt Hacker NewsUS healthcare industry needs to drop more non-essential workers, and invest more in workers that produce value. the industry is so bloated no wonder its costs are high. Just to get my ears checked i had to be processed by 6 different people including phone systems doing precheck-ins. one person does the actual work!
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> US healthcare industry needs to drop more non-essential workers, and invest more in workers that produce value.
Only problem is you can’t destroy the jobs program. Someone pointed out to me that the job market is propped up nearly by healthcare alone.
For someone without and particular skills, credentials, network, medical industry jobs provide one of the last few steps to a stable, middle class life that’s also accessible to working class. In other words, it’s one of the last vessels for any sort of social mobility.
Right, most of those 6 are not medical staff, they are probably there for insurance and billing. And compared to Europe we don't even have a lot of doctors, US has fewer per capita. So the money is going to the billing layer, not to actual care.
Those people may actually be saving money by offloading work from a $250/hr doctor to a $25/hr secretary.
I think the industry itself would be more than happy to classify nurses and doctors as non-essential and drop them.
Imagine the profit margins where you don't have to pay salaries to them.
Probably 3 of them just working to prevent you from going.
It will not change on your time horizon. If you want better healthcare, move to a developed country today. It will take a half decade or more for US healthcare to improve in any meaningful capacity, assuming the necessary events take place to enable improvement in the system.
(to improve US healthcare, laws will need to change; when those laws change is a function of election outcomes and cadence; those election outcomes are a function of the electorate, who they vote for, and the rate of cohort turnover; think in systems)
That's almost entirely due to how our private insurance industry works.
Any given health provider has to deal with thousands of different insurers, and it's not uncommon for individual patients to have primary, secondary, tertiary, and even quaternary insurers the provider then has to deal with to get paid for a procedure.
To keep health care workers focused on providing health care, providers hire a bunch of administrative workers whose job is to offload the work of haggling with insurance onto cheaper workers, but because there's so many insurers, and patients have so many layers of insurance, you end up with something close to 10 administrators per doctor.
Alas, because there's so much money sloshing around in the system, and because the US government is so thoroughly corrupt with bribes from special interests, there's no movement to correct the problem. The system is unsustainable, though, so it will inevitably collapse in on itself at some point, causing a lot of misery and probably death before anything is fixed.