Single payer

If the main concern about health care is cost then the best solution is single payer or Medicare for all. The reason is that Medicare has about 2% administrative cost and private insurance is at 17% so there is a large savings available and this comes by eliminating about 5 million jobs. These are the people who are paid to handle claims. Clinics and hospitals have rooms full of people and every health care provider has one or more people who deal with insurance claims. The other way single payer saves money is by rationing care. When you have several choices you can change companies and this tends to keep benefits high. If Blue Cross says they will no longer cover transplants for people over 80 then you can switch to Aetna so they are loath to do that. With a single payer there will be no choice. Since a large portion of a person’s life time health cost occurs in the last few years of life this is where the big saving can be found. The country spends 3.6 trillion on health care and Medicare, Medicaid and VA account for 1.4 trillion leaving 2.2 trillion for private care. Saving 15% of that is 330 billion and if you divide that by 5 million that represents the $66,000 average salary of the 5 million who will lose their jobs.