Sarah Kliff:
How $1 in health insurance gets spent: Via Blue Shield of California, a breakdown of how each dollar it gets from health insurance subscribers gets spent…. Most of the dollar goes to medical care, not insurer profits. That’s particularly true for Blue Shield of California, which pledged last year to cap its profits at 2 percent…
The thing to focus on is the $0.13 of every dollar that Blue Shield spends on "administrative costs"--i.e., trying to make sure that they don't pay for sick people.
The last time I was in my daughter's pediatrician's office, they had two doctors, three nurses, and four people shuffling paper trying to get insurance companies to pay--and dollars will get you donuts that they were matched by four people shuffling paper back at the insurance companies trying to disallow claims.
The right way to think of it is that Blue Shield collects not two cents on the dollar but fifteen cents--and then sets thirteen of those fifteen cents on fire.
That needs to change.
