I think the idea that government naturally has to overspend is wrong. It is a meme that people tend to trot out whenever there is a political discussion (along with the other side is bums and politicians are unethical crooks).

In this particular case, the idea is that we pay $100 billion a year of tax payer money. (For comparison sake, the F-22 program alone cost 65 billion including development. You could only buy 500 F-22s for $100 billion)

With that 100 billion dollars, we attempt to bring into line the 2.3 trillion dollars that we spend a year on healthcare. (16% of GDP).

16% of GDP is way more than other western countries spend on healthcare. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_compared#Cross-coun...

Other western countries spend about 8-10% GDP on healthcare.

So lets do the math. Lets say we spend tax money on healthcare and we only manage to get it down 1% from 16% to 15%. That would be a 1/16th reduction on 2.3 trillion dollars... approximately 140 billion dollars. So if we even manage to knock 1% off of the amount spent on healthcare by doing this, we've sent 40 billion dollars back to the taxpayers.

If we get more than 1% off of our %GDP towards healthcare, we start making some serious bucks for Americans. If we got our % spent on HC down to even 10% we would have made a 540 billion dollar win on this issue.

(Yes, it comes in the form of taxes, but it also means that in the long run you aren't paying as much for insurance premiums... health insurance premiums might as well be a tax that doesn't go to the government, as having healthcare isn't optional if you plan on living for a significant amount of time...)