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Notes -
I think that this somewhat old (ca. 2015) essay series on exploding costs in Healthcare in the US is interesting and worth reading.
The TL;DR is that there has been a plethora of outsourcing of core functions of healthcare-related companies, at the same time as more healthcare has been able to be provided through the march of technology. The US and larger companies have attempted to solve the issue by requiring more and more 'accountability' (which requires paperwork, man-hours, and ultimately employees to be paid).
When one company employs specialists in finding obscure reasons to deny coverage of claims to patients due to paperwork errors in their Byzantine medical coding system (which are coded by medical coding specialists), and another company employs specialists in appealing the denied coverage and proving the patients should be covered after all - all of those people's paychecks are ultimately coming out of insurance premiums, and making the system cost more. As more companies proliferate in the system, they all try to push the costs of the system onto each other - but since the costs will all ultimately get paid by someone in the end, the net result is that there is a huge amount of paperwork and people employed in thrashing out who exactly is responsible for each and every expense.
Still, though, you get a better sense of the details by reading the whole thing, so I recommend doing that.
As an actuary in healthcare (arguably part of the problem) I heartily recommend that article.
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