Health Care Admin Costs

[Guest guest]

I didn;t look into it closely, but at first glance the math involved in this

article here appears to be wrong.

 

If the admin. costs in the USA are 204 billion per year which they say equals

about $1059 per person in the USA if all people had insurance, but only 60% of

the population is covered, so to me the costs should be about $400 - $500 higher

if you just divided the cost by only those who have actual coverage.

 

If that were true then the the real comparison would be not 3 times as high but

5 times as high on a per user as opposed to a per capita basis. being that

Canada has 100% coverage vs. the USA having 60% covergae.

 

I just glanced at this as I was forwarding it and I really didn't put any time

to this, so maybe I am missing something here.

 

Frank

 

 

 

IS U.S. HEALTH CARE THREE TIMES BETTER?

Many Americans are constantly tied in knots over health care

costs. Anyone with a serious chronic disease spends

uncounted hours haggling with insurance companies and

health care providers. The elderly struggle to pay the often

ruinous cost of prescription drugs. More than 40 million

Americans have no health insurance at all. Meanwhile, to the

north, Canadians are covered by a universal health care plan

that, a Harvard Medical School study finds, costs one-third as

much as ours, on a per-person basis. Critics say the Harvard

researchers are off-base.

http://consumeraffairs.com/news03/health_costs.html

 

Per Capita U.S. Health Care Costs Triple Canada's

August 21, 2003

The overhead cost of operating the United States health-care system is more than

three times that of running Canada's on a per capita basis, and the gap is

getting bigger, according to a study published today in the New England Journal

of Medicine.

 

Savings gleaned from a national health insurance system like Canada's would be

enough to provide medical insurance for the 41 million Americans who now lack

coverage, the researchers said.

 

The study puts the administrative cost of the U.S. system at $294 billion per

year, compared to about $9.4 billion in Canada. That translates to a per-person

cost of $1,059 in the U.S. and $307 in Canada. A similar study, conducted in

1991, put per-capita costs in the U.S. at $450 and Canadian costs at one-third

of that.

 

The study by Dr. Steffi Woolhandler of the Harvard School of Medicine found that

Americans spend more on administrative costs because of the many private

companies supplying insurance coverage. The multitude of companies create

increased paperwork while Canadian doctors send their claims to a single

insurer, the government.

 

" What we've got now under the current health-care system in the U.S. is a giant

food fight between doctors, hospitals, patients and insurance companies as to

who gets stuck with the bill, " Woolhandler said.

 

Also, the study noted, private insurers spend large sums on marketing and

underwriting, costs that the Canadian system doesn't have to bear.

 

However, in an editorial the Journal said that Woolhandler's study may be

overestimating the gap between the two nations. Editorial writer Dr. Henry

Aaron, an economist with the Brookings Instition in Washington, said the authors

have overestimated the cost of the U.S. system by about $50-billion.