George Rebane
There’s no doubt about it, we don’t do healthcare right. As every leftwinger likes to point out, we pay more for healthcare per patient and per capita than any other developed country with liberal governance. Their solution is to nationalize America’s healthcare industry – aka adopting a ‘single payer’ system. Given our inability to do bureaucracies right, every proposal to nationalize winds up raising our cost of healthcare and hiding such increases under variously camouflaged wealth transfer, money printing, and federal borrowing programs.
None of the proposed solutions are sustainable in the sense that they are able to keep a constant level of healthcare services within a non-increasing total cost share of GDP. As documented numerous times in these pages, this is nothing new. Even the progressives’ poster-child countries for nationalized healthcare have not been able to fashion or operate sustainable healthcare systems – they’re all reducing services and/or eating up bigger shares of their GDP. None of these systems can last forever, as they continue kicking the cost can down the road.
Our private, semi-subsidized healthcare system is still the best in the world for delivering clinical care, new medicines, technology advancements, and innovative medical procedures. Where we screw up badly is how we handle all the back-office stuff confirming the levels of delivered care and arranging for their payment through multiple agencies and from multiple sources. That bureaucracy is enormously costly and screwed up to a fare-thee-well. And folding these legacy processes and procedures within today’s bureaucratic mindset into a nationalized structure promises to deliver chaos on steroids.
McKinsey & Company, through its Center for Healthcare Reform, has completed a massive study of our healthcare industry, and identified specific improvements through which we could save more than $250,000,000,000 annually. They have published their findings in a 76-page report titled ‘Administrative Simplification: How to save a quarter-trillion dollars in US healthcare’. This is probably the most important new finding to come along that can move the healthcare debate off dead center and save enormous amounts annually. You don’t have to read the entire thing to get the important details of how and where these savings will be realized. The report begins with a 6-page executive summary with graphics that gets you up to speed. Read it so that you’ll know what you’re talking about the next time you decide to sound off about healthcare reform. (H/T to correspondent)
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