WORD: The price of private health insurance

These are what patient records look like in a system where health takes a back seat to insurance company profits. Image by fsse8info via Flickr

How much would you pay to keep your private health insurance instead of a single-payer system? A thousand dollars? Ten thousand dollars?

How about $350 billion? . . .

Driving this high cost is overhead - plain old ponderous paperwork generated by our private insurance system - to the tune of $350 billion a year. Make no mistake: This money does not pay for health care. It pays for administrators, accountants, billing clerks and benefits managers to transfer our money to health care providers. . . .

It all adds up - to $350 billion.

Clearly filtering our dollars through private insurance companies squanders a lot of money (one dollar out of every three to be exact) before it gets to real-world health care. These losses would evaporate if the U.S. adopted a single-payer system. Mind you, single-payer systems still have administrative costs, just $350 billion less than we have now.

Let's see how $350 billion in paperwork compares to other costs.

It is more than we spend on immigrant health care ($40 billion), defensive medicine ($60 billion), and health insurance fraud ($72 billion) -- combined. It is more than we spend on medications ($261 billion), obesity-related diseases ($144 billion), tobacco-related diseases ($168 billion) or alcohol-related diseases ($96 billion). It's more than we spent on the Afghanistan war ($179 billion). It's more than the annual interest on our national debt ($224 billion).

And it's more than the extra funding needed for comprehensive health care for all Americans ($225 billion).

Curiously, one of America's own single-payer systems, the Veterans Administration, takes care of the sickest patients with the best results at the lowest cost with the highest patient satisfaction in the nation. Can life without private health insurance paperwork be all that bad? . . .