A co-author of one editorial, Ashish Jha of the Harvard Global Health Institute and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said: “It’s perfectly possible to reduce administrative waste in a system with private insurance. We should focus our energies on administrative simplification, not whether it’s in a single-payer system or not.”After administrative costs, prices are the next largest area that the JAMA study identified as waste. Although not explicitly raised in the study, consolidated hospital markets also contribute to higher prices. “It means we should be aware of how we reduce prices, taking into consideration which kinds of products and which populations it might affect,” she said.

Source: New York Times October 07, 2019 15:01 UTC