Doug Henwood
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06:29:51 pm on September 9, 2009 |
A friend pointed out to me earlier today that the market capitalization—the value of all the outstanding stock—of the publicly traded health insurers is about $150 billion. Add a little premium to sweeten the pot and you could nationalize the lot of them for about $200 billion. The total administrative costs of the U.S. healthcare system, which are greatly inflated by all the paperwork and second-guessing of docs’ decisions generated by the insurance industry, are about $400 billion a year. Those administrative costs are about three times what a Canadian-style single payer system would cost. So that means we’d save about $250 billion a year by eliminating the waste caused by our private insurance system.
In other words, the nationalization could pay for itself in well under a year.
Will Obama propose anything like that? Of course not. Instead, he’s going to propose that Americans be required to buy insurance, probably with some government subsidies. So instead of euthanizing the private insurance industry, Obama & the Dems are going to provide them with tens of millions of new customers—compelled to by their product by law, and with some degree of public subsidy. That’s lunacy.
Ben Malley
Sam Husseini
Gwendolyn Mink
Andrew Coates, MD
Don McCanne, MD
Doug Henwood
Deborah Burger
mfwolff
Margaret Flowers
Kim Ives
David Swanson
kathykelly
It’s Just A Ride » Blog Archive » Change I’d Believe In 11:04 am on September 10, 2009 | # |
[...] Dennis Perrin, who remains justifiably skeptical that there’s Hope for Change, a perfectly simple solution: …the market capitalization—the value of all the outstanding stock—of the publicly traded [...]