Bingo! It's a frustrating one because it keeps getting traction on social media.
If a blurb for the book helps - loop me in - and I'm happy to share a free Kindle version of Casino Healthcare if there's interest ;-) dan@dan-munro.com
The chart is especially popular with the provider crowd - naturally - and it's often cited in policy debates, but the data H&W cite is hard to source and ultimately - inaccurate:
" ... though it’s worth noting that H&W are forced to make a lot of assumptions to get here. The reason is simple: there is no remotely reliable measure of the number of health care administrators in America. In fact, I can’t figure out where H&W got theirs. It’s allegedly sourced to the 1989 Statistical Abstract of the United States, but I sure can’t find it there and I have no reason to think the federal government has ever tracked this."
... and the reality is this:
"Since 1970, adjusted for inflation, health care spending has gone up about 600 percent and the number of health care workers has gone up about 500 percent. It’s only natural that the number of administrators would go up at least that much as well."
Haha, I actually hate that chart - I referenced it as misleading in my post. I link to a rebuttal that Alex Tabarrok from Marginal Revolution points out astutely:
"More generally, the graph is misleading because it suggests that “administrators” are to blame for high health care costs and if only we could focus on the “real producers” of medicine, the physicians, costs would be much lower. Blaming administrators for high prices is a lot like blaming “the middlemen.” It’s easy to say and easy to tweet but blaming the middlemen reflects a naive perspective on how goods and services are actually produced in a modern economy."
Bingo! It's a frustrating one because it keeps getting traction on social media.
If a blurb for the book helps - loop me in - and I'm happy to share a free Kindle version of Casino Healthcare if there's interest ;-) dan@dan-munro.com
Just a heads up - that Himmelstein/Woolhandler chart is *very* popular - and not accurate.
Kevin Drum did the takedown back in 2019 here:
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/06/join-me-on-a-dive-down-the-rabbit-hole-of-health-care-admin-costs/
The chart is especially popular with the provider crowd - naturally - and it's often cited in policy debates, but the data H&W cite is hard to source and ultimately - inaccurate:
" ... though it’s worth noting that H&W are forced to make a lot of assumptions to get here. The reason is simple: there is no remotely reliable measure of the number of health care administrators in America. In fact, I can’t figure out where H&W got theirs. It’s allegedly sourced to the 1989 Statistical Abstract of the United States, but I sure can’t find it there and I have no reason to think the federal government has ever tracked this."
... and the reality is this:
"Since 1970, adjusted for inflation, health care spending has gone up about 600 percent and the number of health care workers has gone up about 500 percent. It’s only natural that the number of administrators would go up at least that much as well."
Haha, I actually hate that chart - I referenced it as misleading in my post. I link to a rebuttal that Alex Tabarrok from Marginal Revolution points out astutely:
"More generally, the graph is misleading because it suggests that “administrators” are to blame for high health care costs and if only we could focus on the “real producers” of medicine, the physicians, costs would be much lower. Blaming administrators for high prices is a lot like blaming “the middlemen.” It’s easy to say and easy to tweet but blaming the middlemen reflects a naive perspective on how goods and services are actually produced in a modern economy."
The complexity in healthcare increases the cost, I think that much is obvious but is a less tangled system the solution?