# How the blazes can Sanders' UHC plan cost $32T?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-the-blazes-can-sanders-uhc-plan-cost-32t/818889>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [July 31, 2018, 7:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-the-blazes-can-sanders-uhc-plan-cost-32t/818889 "2018-07-31T19:30:18Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 34

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**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\
**Post date:** [August 2, 2018, 6:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-the-blazes-can-sanders-uhc-plan-cost-32t/818889/34 "2018-08-02T18:36:18Z")

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It\* is\* a hit piece, from a trickle-down/small government [True Believer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Blahous). Table 1 from Blahous’ paper reallly says it all (page 4 of the PDF), because it assumes administrative cost savings of $83 billion per year. To quote myself, that figure is only half of US _wasted_ administrative spending:

> [@Why is socially provided universal healthcare 'better'?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-socially-provided-universal-healthcare-better/612181/13):
>
> It works.
> 
> Other countries (than the US) provide their citizens with equal or better health outcomes for the fraction of the cost of the US market-based system. That’s because we spend more than [twice as much](http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa022033) on administration.
> 
> The UK NHS costs about [$8 billion a year to administer](http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/23e48198-e845-11e0-9fc7-00144feab49a.html#axzz1lnkXg9JN) (and British MPs are constantly promising to cut administrative costs). In the US, _wasted_ administrative healthcare spending alone is as much as [$120 billion](http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/21/why-does-us-health-care-cost-so-much-part-ii-indefensible-administrative-costs/). The total cost is somewhere in the $300-$400 billion range (same link), depending on what you count as administrative costs.
> 
> I don’t know what the additional total cost of private voluntary/supplemental health insurance administration is in the UK. BUPA, which controls half of the market, has UK/North American revenues totaling $2.1 billion. We’ll pretend that every dollar of that was spent in the UK, and that BUPA’s UK administrative costs are the same as in Ireland ([12%](http://www2.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/news/archives/2001/vhirelease-execsummary.aspx)). Taking 12% of $12 billion and doubling it, we get a very rough total cost of private health insurance administration for the entire UK of $0.5 billion. So, adding that to the NHS figure, we get an extremely conservative (ie., too high) total cost of UK health administration of $8.5 billion.
> 
> Multiply that by five, since the UK has one fifth the population, and we see that the cost of the UK NHS and supplemental private system is just over _one seventh_ that of the US system on the low end and just over one tenth on the high end.
> 
> So, fuck the moral and philosophical arguments; our system sucks, and just about anything would be better.

Blahous attempts to justify his administrative cost calculations starting on page 14, but none of his arguments are very convincing. For example, he cites existing Medicare administrative costs and claims they will _go up_. This is nonsense, because Medicare will no longer have to determine if it is the primary payor in every single transaction as it does now.

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