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jason1637 on 27 June 2019
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Bofferbrauer2 said:
the-pi-guy said:

It's not cut and dry. 

If nothing about the system changed except that hospitals charged at the Medicare rate then yes hospitals would definitely shut down.

But having Medicare for all could lead to a change in the system.  One of the easy and obvious changes is reduced administration.  

Hospitals in Europe spend a fraction of what hospitals here spend on administration.  There's a few examples:

- there was a story about a hospital that had 900 beds and 1300 people to handle administration.  Imagine hospitals having fewer doctors than people in administration.

- I read a story about someone who went to Europe to a similar sized hospital.  The hospital in the US had an entire administration wing.  The one in Europe only had 1 person to do the administration.  

Administration is one way that costs can be cut substantially.  If Medicare for all works as hoped and works as well as the systems in Europe do, it's not likely hospitals would get shut down.  

That's also true for the school systems in the US. I read a report a couple months back that in a state in the US between 1985 and 2015 the teacher staff was stable (-1%), but the administration staff rose by 1200% and surpassing the teachers in numbers despite the latter  doing the actual work. No wonder the schools and hospitals ask for more and more money if they waste everything on excessive administration.

It's like an old Luxembourgish joke about why parking enforcement officers appeared in groups of 3:

Spoiler!
One can read, the second knows how to write and the third one has the eraser.

So yeah, bring those down and the costs will go down significantly.

Yang mentioned this in an interview a few months ago when he was outlining his higher education plan. A big reasons for schools increasing their tuition is because there are more administrators and administrators take in a good paycheck. He basically wants universities to go back to the amount of administrators they had in the 90s/80s or they will lose federal money.