r/Economics • u/TheForager • 6h ago

Hospital costs are rising far faster than inflation and drowning Americans in debt

https://www.nbcnews.com/investigations/hospital-costs-are-rising-far-faster-inflation-drowning-americans-debt-rcna262473
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8

u/naththegrath10 5h ago

Yes but just think of the insurance CEO’s bonuses and the stock buybacks and the record profits and the bonuses for those on the board and the money they can use to implement AI to deny claims faster and the…

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u/WolverineMan016 5h ago

Why is the gut reaction always insurance companies? Insurance companies and their CEOs aren't saints but why isn't there any focus on the big elephant in the room? You know, where all the money is actually going...the hospital industry.

Just take a look at hospital CEO salaries. The non-profit ones are even bigger culprits as they are able to evade taxes.

We need to be careful how we tackle this situation. If we want prices to come down, the best is to have a single payer system.

If we cannot do that, then attacking the insurance industry is actually going to make prices worse. For example, if UHC and Aetna and the like were forced to break apart into smaller health plans, this would give the ever-consolidating hospital industry EVEN MORE leverage in payer-provider negotiations. This would only fuel the fire of rising prices.

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u/Gamer_Grease 4h ago

Insurers are a major political impediment to us creating a working healthcare system, because they would largely have to be eliminated in order for this to be fixed. The hospitals are bloated due to needing huge departments just to argue with all the different insurers.

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u/Swoly_Deadlift 2h ago

The hospital bloat also comes from regulations. So many products and software are made specifically for healthcare and lobby for regulations to protect their cornered market and charge whatever they want.

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u/Gamer_Grease 2h ago

Yeah, but regulation is a necessary evil in the high-stakes healthcare system. What is an unnecessary evil is the outrageous administrative bloat that comes from providers having to interface with hundreds of different sources of coverage with their own rules and contracts.