Subject: Re: The Affordability Tour Kicks Off
How about Medicare being made as easy to use, for the doc, as the French system: swipe a person's national health card, type a few codes into the terminal, instead of having a room full of paper shufflers, and receive payment in a few moments, instead of weeks?

More from the net sifter. As offered before, feel free to provide data from any other credible source, if you don't like what the sifter says.

Again, not a should position. We're talking about what is.

Though I do feel the need to push back on your suggestion that all of these folks that aren't doctors or nurses are "paper shufflers." A quick trip over to the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that nearly all folks who work in the health care field are providing patient services (click to the second page):

https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/...

The top four categories, which make up half of all such workers, are nurses, personal care assistants, nursing assistants, and physicians. Those are all folks that are providing patient care and services - we just have multiple different occupational classifications for the people who provide, say, 'nursing care.' So too with categories like "home health aide" and "licensed practical and licensed vocational nurses" and "medical assistants" and "nurse practitioners" The differences you think exist between our utilization and countries like France is almost certainly just an artifact of how we license and categorize our workers, and not that a huge number of our health care industry workers are "paper shufflers." These are people that are providing patient services, not just moving paper around.

There are two categories of workers in the top 25 that appear to be clerical: "medical records specialists" and "other healthcare support workers," but they're fewer than 400K in total, or only a few percentage points of all workers.

Not that this is great - it's probably not ideal that we have so much of our patient care provided by people who are "personal care assistants" or "nursing assistants" rather than actual nurses, either because it's cheaper to do that than to call them nurses or because it's cheaper to use people that aren't trained to be nurses for patient care. But it's not like half our health care system is made up of folks doing nothing but paperwork.