- Health insurers do not provide a service, the service is provided by doctors, nurses and others. Insurers pay for the services of these providers using funds derived from premiums. In this transaction private insurers keep a portion of the payment for themselves.

A public insurer carries out this same transaction at a lower cost because it does not keep a protion of the payment for itself.

The question then is whether a private or public insurer makes this payment at a lower cost.

- The answer is given by comparing how efficiently private insurers and the medicare public plan pay for health providers for their services. Between marketing, profit and administrative cost private insurers divert up to 40% of every dollar the y pay for health services as opposed to 5% for medicare that operates without marketing or profit.

- Another advantage of medicare is that it insures a much sicker and costlier population, those over 65 years old, while excluding no one. It is for this reason that it’s costs are high. In contrast, private insurers cover a much healthier population, those under 65, those without prior illness and by dropping those who become ill. And they do this while constantly incresing premiums.

- The main argument for providing a medicare like public plan for those that have been excluded or priced out of private insurance is not really to promote competition and allow market forces forces to prevail. In the paying for health services there is no competition involved. Either you make that payment directly as in a public plan or you let a private plan make the payment and in doing so you allow it to keep a portion of the payment for itself and to cover the cost of promoting itself.

Private insurers are completely incidental and superfluous when it comes to payment for health services.

You don’t get to accuse me to secretly wanting to destroy my own country and then say “Hey, come on, be bipartisan and include all MY ideas!” That’s BS.

And Knoxville, welcome!

1. Guns kill a hell of a lot of people in America.
2. Choice is ok for some things and not for others.
3. Competition is really a dodgy thing when someone offers a lower price, people will choose it and that is not good for capitalism.
4. Insurance corporations are not large bureucracies, they are nice fuzzy personable entities that have my individual interest at heart.
5. Public option is the entry drug to socialism.

The book by Reid gives more background, IIRC.
The explanation that I was told about it all was that the Brits fought WWII, the nation had urbanized, and the nation needed a way to provide health care, with a lot of worries about epidemics. (Remember, even back in Shakespeare’s era, the Black Plague swept through Europe and England.)

The Brits have that history of epidemics; you can’t be healthy if your neighbors are ill, so they understood that any workable, functioning health care program had to cover **everyone** in order to protect anyone.

It was a cool story.
Attlee wasn’t a political Einstein; he was a pragmatist.
He saw a problem, and did his best to solve it as simply as possible.

http://www.commonwealthfund.or…..lysis.aspx

The key here is that this analysis is referes to “amenable mortality” which is defined as: “deaths from conditions considered amenable to health care, such as treatable cancers, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.”

Once again, the rethugs lie, obscure and mislead. The US is LAST in preventing preventable deaths from DISEASE, not car accidents. (Although we’re probably last there too.