Medical Malpractice Statistics

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Interesting statistics from the Green Bay Press Gazette (and here we thought Green Bay was just a football team, not a town) today:

    • Over the last 30 years, the number of health insurance bureaucrats has grown 25 times faster than the number of doctors — people involved in such non-health-related tasks as marketing, processing bills and denying benefits
    • In 2006, the six largest insurance companies pulled in $11 billion in profits. New medical treatments, such as coronary bypass surgery and neonatal intensive care that is saving extremely premature babies; increased use of medical services — some of it unnecessary; new technology such as echocardiograms and CT scans; and expensive drugs that often are no better than older generic drugs are significant causes of escalating health-care costs
    • Sen. Bernie Sanders (Independent, Vermont) argues that taking the insurance companies out of the equation and enacting Medicare for everyone would save the government $350 billion every year.
    • Commonwealth Fund estimates that, if we passed Medicare for All this year, with implementation in 2010, we would reduce health care costs by $ 2 trillion over 11 years, slowing the growth of health-care costs by $3.3 trillion by 2010.
    • In case you thought the government was inefficient, insurance company overhead — which includes administrative waste, more administrative waste, marketing, and profits — takes up 30 percent of the $2.2 trillion we spend on health care. Although medical malpractice lawyers are alleged to be the problem, malpractice litigation consumes 4 percent.
    • The medical industry throws a lot of money around to get its way: in just three months, April-June 2009 the medical industry spent $133 million lobbying Congress