A few sentences to make your blood boiling in this whopper from Noah Smith:
It’s mostly the providers overcharging you, not the middlemen.
[…] the Kaiser Family Foundation does detailed comparisons between U.S. health care spending and spending in other developed countries. And it has concluded that most of this excess spending comes from providers — from hospitals, pharma companies, doctors, nurses, tech suppliers, and so on.
The actual people charging you an arm and a leg for your care, and putting you at risk of medical bankruptcy, are the providers themselves.
Excessive prices charged by health care providers are overwhelmingly the reason why Americans’ health care costs so cripplingly much.
And to top it off:
Over at Tyler Cowen’s blog, a commenter argues that profit margins are not a good guide to the financial success of a business, and that instead one should look at return on equity (ROE). But if you look at the list of companies with the highest ROE, you see health care providers or suppliers like HCA Healthcare (272%), Cencora (234%), Abbvie (84%), Mckesson (84%), Novo Nordisk (72%), Eli Lilly (59%), Amgen (56%), IDEXX Laboratories (53%), Zoetis (46%), Novartis (44%), Edwards Lifesciences (43%), and so on.
Using “healthcare provider” to mean pharmaceutical companies is at best careless when the article you are writing is directly tied to a murder of a health insurance executive. But what really upsets me is that he is right: physicians, nurses, etc. have allowed themselves to be tied to these behemoths for the promise of what? A steadier paycheck that is less — for the time spent in school and at work — than what a mid-career IT professional earns? Sad. (↬Tyler Cowen)