The Heath Care Bureaucracy Boondoggle

I had an interesting conversation with my doctor the other day. He was saying that in the 1960's, there was about 1 administrator for every 10 physicians, most health care costs were payed out of pocket, and as a result, most insurance covered a significantly smaller percentage of total costs. This all makes sense. The science of health care has developed so many new and wonderful opportunities to treat people in the last fifty years, but all that progress was not achieved without cost. Furthermore, the government steps in more and more to regulate the industry of health care to do what doctors are clearly unable or unwilling to do for themselves, and enforce the Hippocratic Oath. We all know how in bed all doctors are with the Pharmaceutical companies, and then there are all those needless tests to justify the extravagant cost of otherwise pointless equipment and procedures!

Anyway, the net result of all this regulation is that today the ratio is reversed - we now have about 10 administrators for every doctor! So for every new doctor we've added 100 administrators in the past half-century. That's really eff-d up. That means that the cost of care covers not only the expertise of the doctor, but also the salaries of all those administrators. My doctor went on to generalize that most of the administrators in the next building over were needed for compliance to Federal, State, and Local government regulations. Translation: skyrocketing health care costs are a direct result and are primarily driven by the increasing influence of government.

And now thanks to Democrats this country has just created a massive new regulatory requirement on health care. That means more administrators, not fewer, and like I've always said, costs can only go up. Any savings claimed is a total lie.

Furthermore, he described how under government programs such as Medicare, the government tells the provider what it will pay, and of course the provider has no recourse. So as the cost model goes up and the price model goes down, who gets squeezed? Doctors, of course, because patients don't see administrators, and therefore can have no emotional reaction to them. It's the same thing with schools: Always threaten to fire teachers, never administrators, because teachers teach and we see them everyday, but nobody knows what the hell an administrator does.

He predicts that the best and brightest will no longer go into medicine. People may still be motivated by the job, but without appropriate financial incentive many of the high-achievers will affect their desired lifestyle in other fields that are not so heavily controlled. And why wouldn't they? These are the people who make it all work, and the government wants to penalize them for their effort. Screw that.

So get ready to see your primary care physician replaced by a nurse practitioner or PA or worse! That much is an absolute certainty. It's only too bad we can't inflict the same quality of health care under socialism on the a-holes who created it.