# Wouldn't Switching US healthcare to a Canadian system lower the debt faster than anything else?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wouldnt-switching-us-healthcare-to-a-canadian-system-lower-the-debt-faster-than-anything-else/736747>\
**Category:** Great Debates\
**Created:** [November 5, 2015, 7:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wouldnt-switching-us-healthcare-to-a-canadian-system-lower-the-debt-faster-than-anything-else/736747 "2015-11-05T19:00:38Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 74

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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:** [November 9, 2015, 2:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wouldnt-switching-us-healthcare-to-a-canadian-system-lower-the-debt-faster-than-anything-else/736747/74 "2015-11-09T14:51:04Z")

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> [@puddleglum](#):
>
> Where does the savings come from?

Don’t have Canadian numbers, but making the most generous assumptions possible the US spends twice as much on administrative costs as a moderately well-run single-payer system:

> [@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.

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