One Reason U.S. Health Care Costs So Much

Obviously, the health care record keeping is extremely inefficient. Throwing a lot of government money at a problem in hopes of making it more efficient, is like asking the Post Office to beat UPS in shipping efficiency - it's probably not going to happen. A big chunk of the stimulus money, however, is allocated towards establishing electronic record keeping. If it is success, a whole lot of people will loose their jobs over time. Ironic how this will be funded by "stimulus" money.

At a recent conference, David Cutler, a Harvard economics professor and health care adviser to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, presented a version of the following chart:

It shows the number of people employed in various occupations within the health care sector. The takeaway: For every doctor, there are five people performing health care administrative support.

There are some policy initiatives intended to address these inefficiencies and reduce paper-shuffling, including a big chunk of the stimulus package going toward electronic health care records. Whether such measures will be sufficient to streamline the industry is anybody’s guess.

Source: economix.blogs.nytimes.com