The Waste In The Current Healthcare System

Obama may actually have been correct estimating the waste in the current medical system.

According to a new study released Monday, “The U.S. healthcare system is just as wasteful as President Barack Obama says it is, and proposed reforms could be paid for by fixing some of the most obvious inefficiencies, preventing mistakes and fighting fraud.

“The U.S. healthcare system wastes between $505 billion and $850 billion every year, the report from Robert Kelley, vice president of healthcare analytics at Thomson Reuters, found.”

What this means is that an estimated one-third of the nation’s healthcare cost is wastage.

Which means reducing wastage will pay for most of the proposed Democrats’ health care plan.

The rest of it can be paid for by the premiums and co-payments.

Providing healthcare to millions of additional Americans will keep Americans out of the emergency room, therefore reducing health care costs for the rest of us.

Thereby healthcare costs will be even more affordable and the costs of running the government insurance company will also be even lower.

Some of the things this study found are:

• The average American hospital spends a quarter of their budget on billing and administration. That is about 200% more than Canada does. Approximately 18% of the wastage is “inefficient and redundant paperwork”.
• There are almost $200 billion worth of fraudulent claims in Medicare. Many of these claims are claims that hospitals place on Medicare when they end up treating someone who can not pay for their care. Overall 22% of the wastage in health care comes from fraudulent claims.
• Medical mistakes make up about 11% of the wastage.

Along with cutting the wastage, there will also be more money coming from subsidies being denied to private health care and moving that money to the public option.