Hmm. It is indeed difficult to find anything that teases out how much of these “administrative expenses” are for the exact same sort of paperwork and how much is for profit that the private sector gets and the public sector is free of. Still, 2% is damn low, and I’d be shocked if the insurers were gouging out 12% profit while raising prices. Anyway the bottomline, if I recall correctly, is that the public sector can indeed (and currently is) be more efficient overall. Profits are fair to include as an expense in determining how efficient a system is at providing benefit out for dollars in. I have looked for more comparisons of administrative expenses, and to be numbers go all over the place, partly perhaps by variations in definitions of “administrative expenses” and all have shown that the public sector has decreased administrative expenses than the private sector. Again international comparisons confirm this … we have, for example, 50% higher administrative expenses overall than Canada. (By memory, I can get that cite if you rally want it).
Of course what is “a basic plan” would need to be defined and the lobbyists would be on ovetime. That’s a whole seperate thread, but it is very doable.
xtisme, I have a hard time believing that we can’t do it if the Canadians can. Are they that much better than us? Also cites have been provided before about how our infant mortality and life expectency fair poorly compared to other industrialized nations even as we spend more on healthcarre than them.
The Mafia makes big profits, too. So do heroin dealers. And yet, they are illegal. Why? Because they profit from human misery. Because their profits cause social harm. Health insurance profits are harming everyone. They are profiting from human misery. Their profits are causing social harm.
I’m not against profits, as you suggested using the fallacy of the excluded middle. I want General Motors to make a profit. I want US Steel to make a profit. I want the small business I work for to make a profit. Hell, I want to start my own business and run it profitably. I want doctors, nurses and hospitals to make a profit, because they provide a vital service. If you’ve got the guts and stamina to be a doctor, then you deserve to live in a big house, because you’ve got a lot more guts than I do. I want people to profit for doing something productive, being innovative, building the better mousetrap and making life better for people–none of which applies to health care companies. Health insurance companies make profit from standing between people and their doctors and denying them healthcare. They have a very strong financial incentive to do that, and they have whole divisions of their companies devoted to finding ways to deny people the coverage they promised when they signed up. it’s not buisness, it’s extortion. “You want your kids to be able to see a doctor? You’ve got to pay me my protection money first.”
If the question your asking is “What system of health care is the best?”, then you’ve got to take into consideration that in the current system a lot of money is not going to providing health care. It’s taken out of the system by the health insurance companies who then turn around and say “Oh, we don’t have enough money to cover everybody.”