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Health Care Costs

PERSPECTIVE

Does U.S. Tax-Financed Health Spending Really Incur Waste?

Woolhandler and Himmelstein show that close to 60 percent of U.S. health spending now is tax-financed, which is about fifteen percentage points more than is reported by the actuaries of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The difference represents funds extracted from private households as taxes but then cycled back through private insurers and thence to the providers of health care.

The authors assert that this recycling incurs waste in the form of the high overhead and profits siphoned off by private insurers and that no added value is created in the process. That is merely a hypothesis, . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Administrative costs.

 

Consumer satisfaction.

 

Providers’ administrative costs.

 

Disease management.

 

Politics.

 

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