By Free Republic | Created at 2025-01-30 23:35:47 | Updated at 2025-01-31 02:54:44
3 hours ago
Price Transparency and Competition: Put American patients first and drain the health care behemoth’s wasteful costs
New York Post ^ | 01/28/2025 | Steve Moore and Steve Forbes
Posted on 01/30/2025 3:22:56 PM PST by SeekAndFind
At long last, President Trump is poised to slash government spending and aggressive regulations — and advance his first-term health-spending policies that were obstructed by Congress or overturned by the Biden administration.
That’s a big reason why Trump created the now-famous Department of Government Efficiency. The goal: identify and weed out inefficient and counterproductive government spending.
Reform could not come soon enough. Health-care costs, in particular, are ballooning the federal deficit and hindering economic growth.
DOGE won’t make much progress without lowering the rampant costs of the US health-care system, because an astounding 48% of federal expenditures are devoted to health-care outlays.
And it’s going to get worse: Federal health spending is projected to surge from 2023’s $2.2 trillion to $3.8 trillion in 2032, making up a staggering 20% of the nation’s GDP.
Yet much of this spending is avoidable.
Some experts estimate that 30% or more of it amounts to waste, overcharging and in some cases fraud. This stunts economic growth and destroys incentives for health-care competition and high-quality, low-cost care.
The huge discrepancies in charged costs for medical procedures, consultations and treatments, combined with convoluted insurance claims and invoices, leave patients confused and unable to make well-informed health-care decisions.
Additionally, lack of price transparency allows hospitals and health-care providers to institute massive markups on medical services — on average, up to 7 times the actual cost of care.
These concerns can be mitigated through fostering a culture of transparency, efficiency and competition in the health-care sphere.
To do this, the new administration must emphasize disclosure of actual health-care prices — a basic prerequisite for any competitive marketplace that will inevitably put downward pressure on costs and eliminate inefficiency.
Increased transparency in health-care prices, bills and claims would reduce federal spending by nearly $1 trillion a year, according to some estimates.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
TOPICS: Business/Economy; Culture/Society; Government; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: healthcare
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1 posted on 01/30/2025 3:22:56 PM PST by SeekAndFind
To: SeekAndFind
The chart below shows how much faster health care (and college tuition costs) have exploded than any other sector of the economy over the past two decades. 
2 posted on 01/30/2025 3:24:14 PM PST by SeekAndFind
To: SeekAndFind
Go to any doctor’s office or hospital. The staffing level is about 2X what you might expect. In the early 70s, our primary care doctor’s office was staffed by a receptionist and himself. Technology has (seemingly) not made them more productive.
3 posted on 01/30/2025 3:28:00 PM PST by rbg81 (=)
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