I could see it going either way.
With free access, people would be more inclined to go to the doctor for simple and small things, but in return would probably catch more serious issues early and have better access to treatment, therefor reducing the need for intensive and specialized healthcare.
Without, people avoid going to the doctor for small stuff, but end up having to go in with more complicated issues later on.
Think about all the people involved in health care that aren’t involved in actually providing healthcare. Billing, debt collection, assessing insurance claims, denying claims, legal fighting over denied claims, advertising etc.
All that money is better spent providing healthcare.
Eh, this is like “how to lie with data 101”. You want YOY growth, not cumulative since 1970. All this says is we had very few, if any, managers in 1970. Also, we need that green line to move more
You’re defeating your own point while trying to prove it.
There were no managers in 1970, and then, as a result of the HMO Act, an entire (and entirely unnecessary) middleman industry was created and filled with people.
The comment you’re replying to isn’t “lying with data”. It’s illustrating that healthcare in the US had an explosion of unnecessary and parasitic bureaucracy as a direct result of the HMO Act.
Gotta love when people who don’t work in my industry try to explain my industry to me lol.
This is just about the grossest oversimplification I’ve ever read. The HMO act isn’t even close to the worst offender of laws that inflate our costs
I’ve worked in healthtech and biotech for nearly a decade at this point. I have a nuanced understanding of the by-design inefficiencies inherent to the American healthcare and insurance system on a bureaucratic and technical level.
There are of course teams of heinous legislation that enabled this shitshow to evolve into what it is today, but the HMO act definitely was a primary initial driver for bootstrapping the system that we have today. I don’t mean to be reductive, but I do mean to zero in on initialization and inflection points, and that was a pretty damn big one.
You bring up a counter point that I’ve heard often, and my usual response is that most could probably find admin positions in the government’s system, and the rest can figure it out like the rest of us.
The last part doesn’t make for a great sales pitch, so what about those people who don’t have a job anymore?
Keeping people in unproductive jobs isn’t an excuse to keep a drain on the the system and bloating costs of health care.
What do they do in other countries that don’t have those roles? They find jobs elsewhere or train in something else. Of course you wouldn’t be able to reform healthcare overnight, it would take a decade or a generation.
In the UK, hospital administration still goes on. There’s no shortage of jobs for skilled administrators. There are people to assess whether you’re eligible for free treatment, people to assess what treatment you’re eligible for, people to bill patients who choose to go private and chase their debts, etc.
Plus there’s the extra layers of administration at local, regional, and national levels.
Plus there’s people moving money around to ensure bills get paid, facilities are maintained, and staff are fed. Money still moves around even when the patient isn’t the one paying it.