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13% vs. 100% is about average nowadays in the US between what hospitals get paid by insurance companies or Medicare/Medicaid vs. what they bill the patient initially (also what they'd claim spent on the uninsured).
The scam/rent-seeking doesn't stop/start there. Even the 13% includes a "cost" that is tremendously marked up, like the $900 surgical knife that would be less than $9 if not for the medical license requirement. Doctors and nurses have to pay ridiculously high student loans in order to fulfill their state licensing board certification requirement, so their pays have to be marked up so as to make the net pay (after loan payments and taxes) palatable.
The situation is actually quite akin to the munition industry leading up to WWII: cost+10%, therefore the munition makers tossed everything in as "cost." Somehow to the average public school educated minds (Prussia was the pioneer of modern mandatory public education), the economic breakdown was due to all the Jews, Gypsies and other newly defined "non-Germans" whose grandparents did not show up in government census decades earlier, the disabled and the elderly . . . instead of recognizing where the real problem was: the expensive public spectacles like the Nuremberg Rally, the "cost+" government subsidy to many big industrial corporations (for the purpose of paying big banks rent seeking riding on their backs as loans), and silly government enterprises like the original Volkswagen run by Gauleiters (party officials) that could never match Ford on efficient production, and the pristine public roads built decades before the German consumers could afford to buy cars but had to be maintained. Not a single production VW was sold to German consumers before WWII started (or ended), simply because even the much vaunted "German efficiency" mired in bureaucratic government official meddling couldn't compete against even an autocratic entreprenuer like Henry Ford (who in turn was clobbered by Sloan's pre-union GM at about the same time in the US). How's that for bring the discussion back to cars :-)
posted by 75.67.1...
, Mon, 16 Jan 2012 08:59:11
, Sun, 15 Jan 2012 09:43:59
, Sat, 14 Jan 2012 17:52:04
, Sat, 14 Jan 2012 17:50:30
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