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Turns out our privately run healthcare system is wasting $750 billion a year, how do the politicians frame that?

Asked by tedd (14078points) September 6th, 2012

The article linked at the end of my post notes how a large panel of healthcare providers, doctors, businessmen, insurance company staff, etc, etc.. got together and crunched the numbers on our privately run healthcare system. They found the system wastes $750 billion a year on waste and fraud. Detailed down to the annual cost:
Unnecessary services: $210 billion
Inefficient delivery of care: $130 billion
Excessive administration costs: $190 billion
Inflated prices: $105 billion
Prevention Failures: $55 billion
Fraud: $75 billion

To put this in prospective, this is slightly more money in one year than Obamacare is projected to save in the next 10 years. You could literally fund healthcare for all for the next 10 years by eliminating this wasteful spending for 1 year.

And to be clear, this is all before the Obamacare plan even comes into effect. In fact Obamacare directly addressed a few of the things listed above (most notably excessive/inflated costs).

How do the politicians frame this? I find it more than a bit ironic that Republicans continuously decry the Federal government as wasteful and full of corruption, and praise the free market private businesses as a bastion of efficiency and cost savings… and then the second largest private industry in our nation is found to be wasting $750 billion a year (and the number one private industry is banking!). Will they try and pin this on Obama? Will Democrats suggest taking a second look at healthcare to address this wasteful spending? Is everyone too burned out on this to even look at it again right now?

http://news.yahoo.com/report-us-health-care-system-wastes-750b-140106406.html

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