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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (3977)	1/17/2008 8:42:43 PM
From: Katelew	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 42652

Create non-profit health insurance companies and you get the same results. I think you're still confused because you're trying to picture a role for health insurers in a single-payer system. In a typical single-payer system, there are no health insurance companies like Aetna or Blue Cross. The government becomes the insurer, i.e. the single payer. The government replaces them and takes over their function. Their function is simply to collect our premiums and pay out claims. The government would do this instead. Right now we have a multi-payer system, i.e. many different insurance companies. Each one of them has a sales force and marketing costs such as advertising and brochures, etc. They typically have shareholders and many layers of management and they add 10% or so onto their costs so they'll have a profit at the end of the quarter. When the government becomes the insurer, all those costs and profit margins disappear. They aren't needed if the government is the 'insurance company'. So the policy thus costs less. In other words, with those costs out of the way, the public can get the same amount of health care they currently are getting, but the cost of it will be lower. At least this is the theory because this is the cost structure of single-payer systems in Europe. Europe gives its citizens the same amount and quality of healthcare we get in the US, but we pay 30% more. It also means our businesses are burdened with higher health costs for their employees than are their European counterparts. It makes our businesses less competitive in the global economy. So it's not a matter of creating non-profit health insurance companies. In the extreme, there are no private health insurance companies at all. They go out of business, so to speak. But that doesn't preclude the creation of a hybrid system that has some private market players in it.