If national health care insurance is passed?

You seem to be under the misapprehension that all 'public plan' insurance would be payed out of federal tax receipts. In fact, for all the plans that have been proposed, none of the payments will come from federal tax receipts.

Instead, the idea is to form a large non-profit 'public' health insurance company. Anybody who joins the 'public plan' pays insurance payments into it.

Private insurance companies typically pay out 80 to 85 cents for every dollar that goes into them. The remaining money is what the insurance company needs to pay the army of pencil pushers who work so hard denying claims and digging for evidence of pre-existing conditions. Plus a little bit of profit.

Because a national plan won't care about pre-existing conditions and won't work so hard to deny claims, it's overhead cost will be more in line with Medicare's overhead - in the neighborhood of 2 percent instead of the 15 - 20 percent of private insurers. Thus the public plan will cost less and cover more people than the private insurance companies.

I know the cost projections sound like pie in the sky. But stop for a moment and peruse these tables of costs and life expectancies in Canada and Western Europe. You'll see that the rest of the democratic developed world (they all have some form of universal coverage) pays much less than the USA and enjoys slightly longer life expectancies.

The fact is that in the USA we pay nearly *twice* what Europeans pay for health care, and we have both higher infant mortality and lower life expectancy than most European countries. In the table below, im = infant mortality and L = life expectancy. See http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004393.html for mortality and life; see http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/46/33/38979719.pdf for costs.

United States -- im= 6.4, L= 78.0, cost $7290, 16.0% of GDP

Canada --------- im= 4.6, L= 80.3, cost $3895, 10.1% of GDP

Austria -------- im= 4.5, L= 79.2, cost $3763, 10.1% of GDP

United Kingdom -- im= 5.0, L= 78.7, cost $3895, 8.4% of GDP

Denmark ------ im= 4.5, L= 78.0, cost $3362, 10.4% of GDP

Finland ------- im= 3.5, L= 78.7, cost $2840, 8.2% of GDP

France -------- im= 4.2, L= 79.9, cost $4763, 11.0% of GDP

Germany ------ im= 4.1, L= 79.0, cost $3527, 10.4% of GDP

Greece -------- im= 5.3, L= 79.4, cost $2727, 9.6% of GDP

Italy ----------- im= 5.7, L= 79.9, cost $2686, 8.7% of GDP

Norway ------- im= 3.6, L= 79.7, cost $4763, 8.9% of GDP

Spain --------- im= 4.3, L= 79.8, cost $2671, 8.5% of GDP

Sweden ------- im= 2.8, L= 80.6, cost $3323, 9.1% of GDP

Switzerland --- im= 4.3, L= 80.6, cost $4417, 10.8% of GDP

USA has 36 days longer life expectancy than these two countries!

Ireland ------- im= 5.2, L= 77.9, cost $3424, 7.6% of GDP

Portugal ----- im= 4.9, L= 77.9, cost $2150, 9.9% of GDP

According to David Frum (special assistant to president, 2001-2), between 2000 and 2007, the cost of the average insurance policy for a family of four doubled. See http://www.newmajority.com/the-bush-economic-recor... In this question I show a back-of-the envelope estimate of the cost of maintaining the status quo http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AirVV... We can't afford to maintain the status quo, but if we did it would cost $8 to $9 trillion spread over the next 10 years.

Some folks blame our high costs on malpractice insurance. But the numbers don't support that. Including legal fees, insurance costs, and payouts, the cost of the suits comes to less than 1.5 percent of health-care spending. See http://www.insurance-reform.org/pr/AIRhealthcosts.... and http://makethemaccountable.com/myth/RisingCostOfMe... Along those lines, it's interesting to note that a number of states already have "caps and tort reform" yet the insurance companies have not lowered the cost of malpractice insurance in those states. Finally, most malpractice cases occur in state court where the Federal government has no juristiction. See http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_di...

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