Healthcare costs are spiraling out of control.  Naturally, we need a lot more government oversight.  Of course, we already have lots of government oversight in healthcare.  Bureaucrats regulate what healthcare insurance costs, whom hospitals have to treat, what drugs we can buy, and Lord knows what all.

I think we all agree that no matter what, we need doctors, nurses, medical technicians, hospitals, clinics, medical equipment, drugs, and similar healthcare capabilities.  Then you need a certain amount of administrative support to make sure doctors get paid and someone gets billed and similar administrative support that all businesses have.

That will cost some amount of money, right?

Now, on top of the delivery of healthcare, we’re going to layer on legions of federal, state and local bureaucrats.  And for every two or three bureaucrats, the private sector will have to hire someone to deal with the government oversight (I’m assuming that the average private sector worker does the work of at least two or three bureaucrats, but I may be exaggerating government efficiency here.  The ratio of bureaucrats to private sector employees might be five or six to one, for all I know).

The government folks, when they are not asleep at their desks or playing solitaire on their government computers, will figure out who has to pay how much for what.  Since how much things cost and who has to pay what and get what is really complicated, what happens is that some poor souls pay whopping amounts and others pay zilch, kind of the way it works now, only with more government works involved, some people will really get hosed far worse than they are now.

The other thing that happens is that those who don’t have to pay for services hog them.  My best friend is a doctor.  So is my daughter-in-law.  They and any other doctor you ask will tell you, for example, that a really small percentage of patients uses most of the prescription drugs.  These patients are prescription drug addicts.  They go from doctor to doctor to get free drugs for recreational purposes.  Because of patient confidentiality and the threat of litigation, not to mention government oversight, it’s not that hard for these patients to score free or low cost drugs.

There are tons of examples of that sort of inefficiency.

So to fix these kinds of problems, we need to hire more bureaucrats.  Someone somewhere is sure a lot smarter than I am to see how this will bring down the cost of healthcare.