This article is a very scary article.. because the youngest baby boomer is now turning 51 this year… and the oldest is turning 69… For the last 3-4 decades we have been creating this infrastructure to help our health system to save money.. while attempting to assure some sort of positive health outcomes..
What has evolved is a spider web of middlemen… each with their own costly overhead and make a profit motive. One of those middlemen is Express Scripts which is a PBM (prescription benefit manager)… they have about 40% of the PBM market and has a net profit of abt FOUR BILLION dollars.. meaning that this middleman.. that operates much like MasterCard, Visa, Amex charge card system.. so that suggests that just the profits from this middleman part of the industry.. takes TEN BILLION dollars out of our healthcare system that could be used to provide how much healthcare to people.
There is another middleman that negotiates discount/rebates/kickbacks from the Pharmas for the PBM industry… more overhead… more profits.. that does not go to providing healthcare.
The large part of the “health insurance industry” doesn’t actually provide insurance but just shuffles paperwork and pays the bills for large companies that are self insured… the health insurance industry extracts another 20% of our healthcare dollars to cover their overhead and net profits…
So our healthcare system may have evolved into this huge inefficient paper generating monster that is consuming 40%-50% of every healthcare dollar that has nothing to do with direct pt care.
Have we created a “cost saving healthcare system” that is going to bankrupt up.. trying to save us money ?
Filed under: General Problems
I believe that the creation of middle men is lobbyists for insurance companies, the pharmaceutical industry and the Republican and Tea party’s way of sabotaging the Affordable Health Care Act, also known as Obama care. They are driving the cost up to make it look as if AHCA is just another failed experiment when in fact it has helped a lot of people who couldn’t afford health care. Just another case of discrimination.
These middlemen started around 1970 and have been consistently expanding their strangle hold on our healthcare system