Health care in America is really expensive, so expensive that it’s out of reach for millions of people. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Insurance middlemen and other for-profit parts of the system drive up the cost with waste that has nothing to do with providing health care.
A new report by the influential Institute of Medicine finds that the U.S. wastes as much as $750 billion every year — about one-third of every dollar — in its health care system. This waste — resulting from needless spending on overhead and administration — has deadly results. The committee estimates that “almost 75,000 needless Ai??deaths could have been averted in 2005 if every Ai??state had delivered care on par with the best performing state health.”
The report lays out a number of broadAi??recommendationsAi??for eliminating this waste, including centering care more closely around patients and bringing a lot of the paperwork involved in health care into the Digital Age.
But there’s one very simple solution for eliminating this waste. If the U.S. had a single health insurance program like Medicare covering everyone, we could eliminate 30 percent of our health care costs that go into the administration, profit, and other costs that result from having thousands of different private insurers acting as middle-men. Covering everyone and saving money in the process. Now that’s progressive.
