Private health insurance can never, even in principle, compete with single-payer [View All]

[Jackpine Radical]

in providing cheap and effective health coverage.

For starters, private insurance costs about 25% more to administer than a single-payer system like Medicare. Furthermore, there are some other factors that generally don't seem to get figured in, one of which is the obscene profits the insurance moguls extract from the system. Another type of savings would occur in the billing departments of the providers. You wouldn't believe how much effort goes into just trying to get the insurance companies to pay up on what they're obligated to do. They hire people to obfuscate, "lose" paperwork, deny authorizations, renege on authorizations already given, etc. They have no motive to see that people get adequate health care. They only have motives to deny, reduce, and delay payment--anything to boost profits. You want good health care; your employer wants cheap insurance. Guess who wins?

And then there is the matter of the totally perverse incentives that operate in the field of health care. You may think it would be in the best interest of providers to pay for preventive care. An ounce of prevention and all that. Not so. The average client is with a given insurer for maybe 15 or 20 months (I don't know the exact current number, but it's in that range) before they move on somewhere else--the employer switches insurers, the employee switches jobs, the insurer gets merged with someone else--whatever. Therefore it is not cost-effective to spend money preventing a problem that is not likely to manifest in the next 20 months. This would not be the case with single-payer, because no matter what happens, you're not going away.

No matter what cobbled-up plan they come up with, unless a Medicare for All-type plan is on the table, we are going to get screwed again.