Happy New Year!

“Like other observers,” noted the prominent health care economist Henry Aaron, of the Brookings Institution, “I look at the U.S. health care program and see an administrative monstrosity, a truly bizarre mélange of thousands of payers with payments systems that differ for no socially beneficial reason, as well as staggeringly complex public systems with mind-boggling administered prices and other rules expressing distinctions that can only be regarded as weird.” The administrative monstrosity we have built costs us a lot of money – by far the highest administrative costs of any health care system on earth. The U.S. Government Accountability Office concluded that if the country could get the administrative costs of its medical system down to the Canadian level, the money saved would be enough to pay for health care for all the Americans who are uninsured.

T. R. Reid: The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care (2009, Penguin)