Scams 101: Turn your entire medical bill into 1 dollar and a whole quarter is just "processing" that medical bill

[ck4829]

What exactly are medical bills paying for?

Well...

In last month’s job report, healthcare accounted for a whopping 43 per cent of all new jobs added. The sector was a steady driver of growth over the previous year as well, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that it will continue to be so in the future. In fact, its 2024 to 2034 projections show that healthcare and the social assistance sector (which includes things that overlap with healthcare, such as vocational assistance and food support, as well as other things like housing aid and childcare) will be the fastest growing sector over the next decade, with an 8.4 per cent predicted job gain.

If the BLS is right, healthcare and social services will add many millions of new jobs to the economy. That’s good. But the reasons for the gains aren’t so reassuring. As the bureau puts it, “growth in this sector is expected to be primarily driven by both the ageing population and the growing prevalence of chronic conditions such as heart disease, cancer, and diabetes”. In short, America is older and less healthy than ever before, and the costs associated with this are creating more spending.

...

At the same time, US healthcare is dominated by large, inefficient companies. A wave of hospital consolidation has increased pricing power among providers (labour costs in the US healthcare system are far higher than in many other countries). Prescription drugs also cost exponentially more than elsewhere, where governments with socialised medical systems negotiate directly with providers for discounts.

There is also the huge problem of “shadow work” and administrative costs within the healthcare insurance system. I have excellent (at least by American standards) insurance coverage, yet I regularly spend hours each month dealing with issues like lost claims, incorrect payments and cheques sent to the wrong payee. A full quarter of American healthcare spending goes to things like billing, claims processing and customer service, in large part because we don’t have a single-payer system that could be streamlined and more easily digitised.

https://www.ft.com/content/6b1bcbab-21d4-49a3-9940-d7550f042e5d?syn-25a6b1a6=1

Paywalled just so you know, but I viewed the source because I'm like Neo.