If a competing hospital can provide equivalent service while also not spending so much on an administrator, why didn't they already do it?
The insurance administrators are fighting to provide as less reimbursement as possible and the hospital administrators are fighting to provide as much reimbursement as possible. The administrators are probably doing compliance work, negotiations.
I wonder whether regulations can be used to cap the role of administrators at the expense of slightly less efficient market - this might work if administrators are just adversarially interacting and reducing their scope can help the overall picture.
To elaborate on that, when one gets health insurance from their employer, they effectively get a tax cut, and this in turn leads to larger proportion of employment compensation being paid through health insurance benefits than it needs to be, which translates to extravagant health insurance plans for those who are employed.
When people don't rely on insurance and pay out of pocket, generally prices go down over time and the industry as a whole becomes more efficient. The opposite trend has been in place in healthcare, with a growing percentage of healthcare spending being through insurance. And the result is the opposite of what's seen in more market-based industries: prices going up over time.
Lack of health care records interoperability (locks patients into a system).
Much of the well-intended regulation around healthcare ends up getting perverted to prevent competition.
https://www.cms.gov/priorities/burden-reduction/overview/int...