Yet we're ok with spending trillions on AI to eliminate jobs everywhere, including healthcare.
I don't think that's the reason.
Personally I'm of the opinion the reason it isn't being solved, is because the people whose job it would be to solve it get to keep their jobs due to donations from pharma and insurance companies.
Having had my share in the administrative part of the medical field, that figure is most probably somewhat misleading. Every time you deal with billing you are bound to deal with granularity. On one extreme you could bill per case, on the other extreme you can count the paperclips used. It could seem at the first glance that the more you move towards the latter, the more time has to be spent by someone to somehow eventually form the invoice.
However, this surface-level conclusion misses the fact that patient care does not start and stop at the the operating room door. Some processes mandate transparency/traceability and thus documenting what's being done and used is part of the process anyway. [edit: the final deliverables are not a treated patient, but rather a treated patient and documentation complete with medicine authorizations / prescriptions (including for drugs used internally), sick-leave certificates, etc.]. That data is then effectively reused for billing, with minimal overhead hopefully. Yes, there's a lot of room for improvement and automatization, but activities not directly related to active care make up a sizable portion of the time.
Healthcare is nearly 20% of GDP (and growing), so administration is 3%-6% of the US economy!
The Woolhandler/Himmelstein 2020 figure ($812B) updates to $1.13-1.66T in 2023 dollars when adjusted for healthcare inflation. The CMS narrow admin estimate ($410B) plus CAP's billing complexity analysis ($496B) gives a $906B floor. Those three methodologies agree on the floor, disagree on the ceiling. Issue #5 covers all three and explains why the range is so wide. Coming soon.
Why not simply hire them to do something that isn't pointless - like dig ditches or clean garbage
Are you arguing that since we think we're all special that we should be accepting that other people think they're special?
Meanwhile, people getting laid off (just so the jobs could be exported to countries with more poverty and lower pollution, worker's rights, and standards for working conditions) were getting berated that they should "learn to code" for decades, while we laughed and discussed our stock options.
https://apps.schools.nyc/dsbpo/sbag/default.aspx?DDBSSS_INPU...
That's the reason why a lot of inefficiencies are kept in countries around the world: it keeps people employed and moves money through the economy. If broken things were suddenly to be made efficient overnight, the government wouldn't be able deal with masses of angry people/voters suddenly out of a job.
Literal overnight change might be too radical (although, frankly, I'd want to see some academic work on the matter because it sounds like it might work - typically the problem seems to be that the body politic tries every alternative but good policy first then blames the mess on freedom) but people who are scared of rapid improvement because they don't like change are a massive threat to human prosperity and really shouldn't be left in charge of anything important.
Delaying the industrial revolution was never a good choice at any point in human history. The potential gains from efficiency are unbelievably large.
Keeping people employed through inefficient bullshit jobs is better for the government than paying them to sit at home, since this way you have control over their livelihoods and their votes.
This is some idealist fairytale view that people like to believe in but doesn't actually exist.
Why?
>but Scandinavia and much of northern Europe
That's like 3-5 out of 195 countries and only 0,3%-0,5% of the world's population. Being born there is like winning the lottery so maybe take that into consideration when arguing with such examples since that's not the norm. Like what are the odds that people you talk to online are part of that 0,5%? So who's the one being needlessly confrontational?
>Trust in and satisfaction with government institutions in Scandinavia and Finland are much, much higher than in the US
I don't care about the situation in the US since I don't live there. I'm talking from the perspective in Europe(not Scandinavia) where I can't say the democracy is representing or serving me. No law maker asked about the major decisions the EU made.
Idiot brexiteer talk...
The nightmare isn't just for her; it's also for her patients. She now spends almost as much time walking her patients through the insurance bureaucracy than she spends on actual treatment. And it's so sad because her patients are so desperate (parents of extremely sick children), but often get nothing but bureaucratic run-around from their private insurers.
So yeah, it's been a lose-lose situation since private insurance took over.
One thing which is not terribly popular to point out is that at least on procedure pricing - wages are way way higher here. Some of that is that education is far more expensive so then we need to pay very well to pay that down. Also we have a cartel that limits the number of medical graduates.
NYC have been striking and to quote the union-friendly NYT "The three hospital systems affected by the strike said their nurses on average make about $160,000 a year and are seeking raises that could propel nurses’ salaries on average past $200,000, according to the hospitals."
By comparison UK pays nurses like US blue state fast food workers. Per google - "Average nurse salaries in London are the highest in the UK, generally ranging from £37,000 to £55,000 per year." Note NYC minimum wage is at $17/hr though many hospitality workers in the $20s, with a renewed Mamdani push to $30/hr minimum.
And US tax rates at these 3-4x higher compensation levels are same/lower than the UK..
Then add Americans having generally unhealthier lifestyles, being more litigious requiring higher malpractice insurance, etc..
The US is being pilfered by like less than 10,000 people so the federal government can give them corporate welfare worth $50 trillion over the decades [1] at the expense of workers.
But yeah... it's those damned nurses wanting to have fair wages and working hours that are the true enemy not the ghouls in SV that profit off of human misery... it's the nurses...
The idea that healthcare needs to be profit driven should be an idea excised from our collective intelligence.
[1] https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-ameri...