> In contrast, 33% of US healthcare costs go to insurance overhead, and >17% of our GDP goes to health care, so nearly 6% of the gdp goes to private insurance middle men.
6% of GDP to private insurance? Math doesn't add up on this back-of-the-napkin math. That's an entire Apple of operating costs every year.
The biggest insurance company, UnitedHealthcare, is worth 200 bill in the market. The gov could buy the big 5 insurance companies with half its yearly medicare budget.
Don't confound paying to insurance and paying to providers!
> So, private insurers really are squandering many more healthcare dollars, and are also much less efficient than the federal government.
I will answer seriously in a second, but for real: how is it so obvious that the private market beats the government on almost anything at any time, even this very government (for example, education) and still, the level of debate is "government is more efficient". Government is never more efficient, because it doesn't care about efficiency.
The comparison of efficiency between medicare and private insurance is grossly misrepresented by Bernie Sanders. First of all, there are some disingenuous numbers: it uses a measure of efficiency of total cost/admin costs, but that skewes severely in favor of medicare bacuse it has an older population that has more expensive treatment.
Some economists looked into this and the cost of administration per patient is similar.
Second, a great part of why medicare has less admin burden is that its collections are done through payroll taxes. This means the admin staff is included in other government agencies. This is not a public-advantage, because you can also use payroll taxes to pay for private insurance if you wish so, something that exists in some other countries. ( to my dismay, for the following topic).
Another trick here is that medicare collects from everyone and pays for a few. That is a great way to never have to market, administrate or manage people on your plan: you are not going to use it? tough luck. You dont like it? tough luck. You don't have quality coverage in your area? Tough luck.
This trick is so pervasive that even Bernie Sanders claims how medicare patients are so happy: why wouldn't they, the premium they should pay to maintain it is about 1k a month, and they pay 150!
Forth, it is key to understand that medicare offerings are not market competitive. They pay half of what private insurance pays, and there is no way in hell you make that work. Private insurance subsidizes medicare patients, and doctors would abandon the network if they were forced to accept medicare rates.
This is a long topic, but to re-frame the conversation: what makes healthcare in the us expensive is NOT private insurance. Most of the world has private insurance! even Canada! Even France! Spain, Norway, etc. US healthcare is expensive because it is one of the most tight regulated expensive markets in the US.