# Why is socially provided universal healthcare 'better'? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [February 8, 2012, 12:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-socially-provided-universal-healthcare-better/612181 "2012-02-08T12:09:40Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 13
**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:** [February 8, 2012, 2:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-socially-provided-universal-healthcare-better/612181/13 "2012-02-08T14:55:11Z")
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. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-socially-provided-universal-healthcare-better/612181)._