That's where the government comes in. FORCE changes in those sectors (healthcare, pharmaceutical, insurance). That's the regulation that has been lacking. Too many politicians (of both parties) are bought and paid for by those industries. If enough pressure were to come from the citizenry, change could happen. REAL change in the system, without the need for socialized healthcare.

What do you think?

how much would be saved if this one problem were fixed?

I lived in Australia for about 12 years. The only staff my GP had was a front office/receptionist that also managed the payments and scheduling for the patients. It was a bus practice with several GPs working there. Medical records were kept online and I received a copy of all lab reports/x-rays/etc.

Reimbursement is made intentionally complex and difficult to both the doctor and the patient in the hopes that either everyone will give up and go away or a time limit will expire. It costs the doctor in additional staff to manage the insurance claims and the patient in time/money, effort and stress in trying to be reimbursed or to get the insurance company to pay for what they have agreed to pay.

Why do they do this? profit. Why don't they change and fix what their 'customers' and the 'health care providers' have been requesting for years/decades? The insurance companies have absolutely no reason to fix it.

We end up paying for insurance specialists that work with doctors/hospitals as part of our 'health care cost'. They, like the insurance companies, add no value to actual health care.

“Medicare pays 19% less for doctors and 25% less for hospitals. Add the 12% difference in overhead to the 22% overpayment by private providers, and you have 34% cost difference between profit and nonprofit systems. Name me ANY other strategy that can yield a 1/3 cost savings.” Beautiful way to use cost-shifting against private insurance. Eliminate the private market, and you'll have no one left to shift those costs onto. You're also forgetting that part of that “overhead” is in the form of taxes, which Medicare doesn't pay.

http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_12523427

some highlights (please read the whole article):

“Average after-tax income of Canadian workers is equal to about 82 percent of their gross pay. In the U.S., that average is 81.9 percent. (no higher taxes)
The provincial single-payer system in Canada operates with just a 1 percent overhead.
Ten percent of Canada's GDP is spent on health care for 100 percent of the population. The U.S. spends 17 percent of its GDP to cover 85 percent of its population
In Canada, the government has absolutely no say in who gets care or how they get it. Medical decisions are left entirely up to doctors, as they should be.
There are no requirements for pre-authorization whatsoever. If your family doctor says you need an MRI, you get one. In the U.S., if an insurance administrator says you are not getting an MRI, you don't get one no matter what your doctor thinks”

To me healthcare could be seen as a something the government is responsible for ensuring (not providing).
The bills currently going through Congress aren't even close. Baucus is a joke, and the House versions are just short of Soviet health care. There just has to be something out there that makes us both happy.

Yes, and how much of that bureaucracy is in place to ensure that the insurance company doesn't pay out a cent more than necessary to protect profits?

Profits themselves may be small, but there's a lot of money being spent on protecting and maximizing those profits.

National healthcare would be less expensive.

The “moral” component of our health system like recission, denying preexisting conditions, the number of uninsured, etc. is a different issue than aggregate cost.

The proponents say that having more preventative medicine and everyone insured will save costs. While this is true on the individual level, it's not true on the system level. However, as I've noted before, the cost of actually insuring everyone and giving more preventative medicine is rather negligible. Those two components will greatly increase quality of life and make our expenditures more efficient from that perspective.

As for the insurance companies, I personally feel that no insurance company offers anything of value. If it were up to me all insurance in any field would be completely non-profit, and feel the artificial stratification of policies leads to gross inefficiencies.

Also, the profit motive, while not necessarily profits themselves, lead to lovely industry practices like recission,

By the insurance industry's own reckoning, their overhead plus profit is 16.7%. The overhead of Medicare is 3.3%. Additionally, because insurance companies work on a “cost plus” basis, they apparently don't try too hard to negotiate decent rates with providers. Medicare pays 19% less for doctors and 25% less for hospitals. Add the 12% difference in overhead to the 22% overpayment by private providers, and you have 34% cost difference between profit and nonprofit systems. Name me ANY other strategy that can yield a 1/3 cost savings.

Conservatives love to harp on “tort reform”, but malpractice is only 0.5% of health care cost. Even if 100% of malpractice claims were frivolous or fraudulent (obviously they are not), the savings there is trivial. Even if I were heartless enough to say 'tough luck' to all those harmed by negligence, fraud, incompetence or error, there simply isn't a meaningful reduction of cost in that.

Someone show me how private insurance can cut even 10% of health care cost. You'll still be 24% short of the savings you could have TOMORROW through a Medicare-for-all program.

Yes. Yes. And, yes. Succinctly and accurately put. Thank you.