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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

What you should mourn is the healthcare costs being passed on to the patients to pay these people.

Everyone is all "medicare for all!" instead of going after (one of) the real sources of the cost: careless inefficiency.

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Our healthcare costs are not high because six people are redundant.

The health insurance business was almost a $900 B market in 2017, that's enough to pay 12,000,000 people $75,000/yr. Adding six, or six thousand, or 600,000 redundant employees affects that market very little.

They are high for many reasons including the six people redundancy.

Healthcare in the US is basically “cost plus” which means the higher the costs, the higher the profits.

It’s a weird space where many payers don’t really have a drive to reduce costs.

Provider inefficiencies are very real as well.

Is careless inefficiency of for-profit corporations in a somewhat competitive market ever a root cause of high prices? I think it's more of a sign that they're raking in so much dough it wouldn't be worth their organizational overhead to pay attention to such crumbs. They aren't making a trillion dollars a year by missing things they'd know how to fix if they hung around HN.

as if the reduced inefficiencies would actually go to reducing costs rather than further padding executives pockets

They absolutely would have to pass along a lot of the cost savings to patients, otherwise they would lose those patients to other companies.

But I can appreciate that your pet preferences prohibit you from believing this is so.

sure, and by the same logic, any health insurance company who rejects claims unfairly should be supplanted by a competitor who will not and who will scoop up all those patients. unfortunately the health care market and system do not meet the assumptions that are implicit in your line of reasoning, and we do see a lot of such anti-consumer behavior by health insurance companies, even as the profits of health insurance companies soar (proving that they are not at the 0 margin that naive economic reasoning would predict)

It's both. Everybody takes a cut of the benefit for a good long while.

Please don't be snarky or cross into personal attack.

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