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Good news: @amprog acknowledges that "the United States is spending about twice as much as needed on the administration of health care." ampr.gs/2uSyoml
PNHP's estimate for administrative excess is $504B annually (source here: bit.ly/2OYHZ4d via @AnnalsofIM). CAP's estimate is much lower -- $248B annually -- but it is still in the "hundreds of billions of dollars" range.
CAP also acknowledges that "major changes to the U.S. health care system have the greatest potential to bring down costs," but insists that "more incremental changes could reduce administrative waste."
Unfortunately, the policy proposals they highlight would barely make a dent. CAP argues that standardization of payment rules, streamlined enrollment in public programs, automation, and other incremental reforms would generate, at best, $70B in annual administrative savings.
#SinglePayer, on the other hand, would eliminate ALL administrative excess by negotiating fair prices directly with providers, establishing global budgets for hospitals, doing away with "value-based" payment schemes, and vastly simplifying the billing process.
CAP insists that the U.S. could achieve universal coverage through a multi-payer system like "Medicare for America." And it's true, we could. But we would be leaving hundreds of billions of dollars on the table each and every year. ($434B by our estimate, $178B by theirs.)
And while proponents of incremental reform point to multi-payer systems in Europe as viable models, they fail to acknowledge that (nonprofit, tightly regulated) "private insurers" in other countries bear little resemblance to profit-hungry private insurers in the U.S.
If we were to have a multi-payer system that produced European efficiencies, then we would have to disband current insurers and replace them with European-style insurers. It would be far easier and much more efficient to replace them with improved #MedicareForAll.
