Angry Bear has a post up about health care administrative costs that is a very good read:

We have a couple of estimates of how high administrative costs are - i.e., expenses incurred by the health care system to do things other than to provide health care services. One prominent study that appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2003 estimated that the cost of administering the US’s health care system was about $300bn in 1999. A more recent study in the International Journal of Health Services found that in 2003, administration costs in the US health care system ate up about $400bn, or about 25% of total health care spending.

As an aside. When I used to apply for grant funding of counseling programs, any administration costs over 10% were considered excessive.

I watched as a young therapist intern as the health insurance business added this layer of "managed care" bureaucracy. Anyone accessing health care these days has experienced the intrusiveness of insurance on their own care. It has grown into an enormous constituency of it's own and offers relative good jobs to white collar workers; a sort of welfare for the lower middle class if you will. But as predicted, any cost containment offered by managed care has been more than offset by the costs to insurance companies in terms increased labor costs, administrative costs and of delayed care which ends up being more expensive. I can vouch for this fact based on my own experiences as a care provider.

Bush is going to bloviate a lot tonight about health care. Fact is, the U.S. has the least efficient, most costly health care system, with the poorest outcome in terms of health measures, in the world. Despite claims otherwise, we do have full national health care coverage. The rich pay for it. The middle class gets increasingly stuck with higher premium and co-pay costs for less coverage, and the poor use the emergency room, usually when it's too late and the costs of treatment become exorbinant.

With that as a back drop, the Republicans are going to try and ram through further health care reforms that screw everyone but the rich. It's gonna be like a replay of the social security reform debacle, except this time it will be played out during an election year after the deployment of the spectacular perscription drug program.

Same shit, different day.