One of the biggest problems with controlling health care costs is that whenever you make any significant changes to anyone's pay or workday, groups representing those workers go to the press and complain that managers are forcing them to kill patients. nytimes.com/2020/01/31/hea…
Sometimes those groups are right! The problem is that it's hard for those of us outside the system to tell whether this is a true threat, or part of a long tradition of workers complaining that the sky will fall if they have to work harder.
And of course we worry way more about hearing that our pharmacist might kill us than that our cell phone provider might drop our calls, making those complaints extra-effective in the health care sector.
Health care reformers who think that you have identified a lot of easy fat that can be cut out of the system so we can reduce spending to European levels: take note.
