SEATTLE NEWS ARCHIVES & FEATURES

Health care and ratio of paper pushers to doctors is 16 to 1

Mar 14, 2017, 5:21 PM | Updated: 5:28 pm

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Doctor. (Army Medicine, Flickr)

(Army Medicine, Flickr)

You’re going to hear that it’s not regulation that has driven up the costs of health care. But regulation has been increasing since the 1930s.

The free market is the entry point to health care access. But the meme from the left is “if only the government would do more.” And the Republicans cannot seem to sell the free market.

Related: Todd Herman become an Independent over Republican health care plan

Since the 1970s, the rate of growth of administrators in the health care system, paper pushers, has increased 2,700 percent. The rate of doctors has increased 100 percent. The ratio of administrators to doctors is 16 to 1. That’s 16 administrators to every one doctor. And those administrators cost money. That’s why it’s much less costly when you remove insurance and government regulation and you go to cash only clinics.

Where are the big paychecks in health care? The average salary for a surgeon is $306,000. The average salary for upper level paper pushers in insurance is $584,000 dollars.

Graduates from medical schools aren’t going into medicine. They are going into overhead.

And part of what they’re doing is adding the 68,000 codes that Obamacare created that need to be entered into computers. It had been 13,000 codes prior to Obamacare. Some of the codes are: Hurt at the Opera, Walked into a Lamppost, Stabbed while Crocheting.

This all drives up health care costs. And this doesn’t even get into fraud within Medicare.

As always, please listen to the full audio clip for complete context.

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Health care and ratio of paper pushers to doctors is 16 to 1