Single payer in other countries operates much like Medicare does in the US.
Medicare Is More Efficient Than Private Insurance ? Health Affairs Blog
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Medicare Has Lower Administrative Costs Than Private Plans.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, administrative costs in Medicare are only about 2 percent of operating expenditures. Defenders of the insurance industry estimate administrative costs as 17 percent of revenue.
Insurance industry-funded studies exclude private plans’ marketing costs and profits from their calculation of administrative costs. Even so, Medicare’s overhead is dramatically lower.
Medicare administrative cost figures include the collection of Medicare taxes, fraud and abuse controls, and building costs.
Medicare Is Publicly Accountable, Private Plans Are Not
When it comes to how much it costs private plans to deliver care, or individual insurer innovations that deliver value, the publicly available data are scarce. Goodman and Saving present only one study on the ways that insurers try to control costs, and this was published by AHIP. Because Medicare is publicly accountable, it allows us to study what works so that we can improve the health care system.
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The authors cite a number of innovations that could lower the cost of care, but all of them have been introduced by doctors and clinics, not insurers. Because insurance companies treat their claims data as trade secrets, we do not know if they have adopted such innovations.
Even government-funded Medicare Advantage plans don’t release payment and coverage data.
A closer look at the data shows that, contrary to Goodman and Saving’s claims, Medicare delivers health care more efficiently than private insurers. Medicare’s public accountability and bargaining power give it the ability to drive system change and control skyrocketing health care costs, while profit-driven private insurers have offered no solution.
