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

To: i-node who wrote (11843)	11/24/2009 10:01:31 PM
From: Eric	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 42652

Interesting That 24% number came from the documentary "Sick in America" that aired on PBS Frontline recently. From the New England Journal of Medicine: Costs of Health Care Administration in the United States and Canada content.nejm.org

To: i-node who wrote (11843)	11/25/2009 11:39:21 AM
From: TimF	Respond to of 42652

And not only is the estimates for private sector insurance admin costs too high, the estimates for the government sector are too low. 1 - Taxes count towards the overhead for the private sector, while the public sector is tax free (it receives tax money but it doesn't pay it). If you think money going to the government is a bad thing, then maybe you could count the private sector payments of taxes as overhead and costs, but if you think that then you wouldn't want public sector insurance. If you think money to the government does some good, then the taxes paid by the private sector companies, while a cost to them, are not a cost to the system. 2 - Billing and collections - In the private sector counts this is added to overhead. In the public sector the IRS or the equivalent does this and it isn't counted towards the overhead for the insurance system. 3 - Borrowing costs. - When the public sector does borrow money it gets counted as interest paid by the government, but not as an overhead cost to the program in question. (And even if it did it would be effectively subsidized by the government as a whole bearing the risk, not just the specific program, so the rates would be lower.) 4 - Other forms of overhead also aren't counted. You don't count the salaries of the administration and congress and their staffs, even on a prorated basis, towards the cost for Medicare and Medicaid and SCHIP, but the salaries for the board and senior management and their staffs are counted for the private sector. If a private sector company has to pay for outside auditing that counts towards overhead, but the GAO costs don't get added in the public sector calculations. The costs for GSA services doesn't get added, the cost for strategic budget planing by the OMB doesn't get added. That's all off the top of my head, I may have missed some.