alt Hacker NewsThat'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.
We know this isn't true, because CMS publishes annual numbers of the net costs of all these functions, and the total cost of service delivery absolutely dominates everything else. There is definitely annoying and pointless insurance overhead; anyone who has ever gone to the doctor for a followup appointment has seen that happen. It's just not where all the money is going.
A thing that's always worth keeping in mind: retail clinical practice for non-geriatric adults is a very small fraction of all health care costs in the US, and end-of-life care is a very large fraction. Most of us only have exposure to the former, and we generalize from it, but that's not giving us an accurate picture.