[Peace-discuss] Sell-out

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Doug Henwood wrote this before tonight's speech.  --CGE]

A friend pointed out to me earlier today that the market capitalization—the 
value of all the outstanding stock—of the publicly traded health insurers is 
about $150 billion. Add a little premium to sweeten the pot and you could 
nationalize the lot of them for about $200 billion. The total administrative 
costs of the U.S. healthcare system, which are greatly inflated by all the 
paperwork and second-guessing of docs’ decisions generated by the insurance 
industry, are about $400 billion a year. Those administrative costs are about 
three times what a Canadian-style single payer system would cost. So that means 
we’d save about $250 billion a year by eliminating the waste caused by our 
private insurance system.

In other words, the nationalization could pay for itself in well under a year.

Will Obama propose anything like that? Of course not. Instead, he’s going to 
propose that Americans be required to buy insurance, probably with some 
government subsidies. So instead of euthanizing the private insurance industry, 
Obama & the Dems are going to provide them with tens of millions of new 
customers—compelled to by their product by law, and with some degree of public 
subsidy. That’s lunacy.

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