Health Insurance Expenses that Are Unnecessary with Single Payer
Complaints about expensive health insurance are often refuted by noting that insurance company profits are not unusually high. But the final profit margin is not the relevant statistic. Corporate health insurers have a variety of pre-profit expenditures that waste patient money and which would be unnecessary under a single-payer system. These include (1) billions of dollars spent on advertising to take market share from competitors that offer an extremely similar product, (2) many corporations duplicating the same bureaucracy, (3) writing software that's already been written by other insurance companies, rather than sharing a single system, (4) lobbying (bribing) Congress to suppress any better alternative like single payer, (5) spending to defeat insurance regulation and reform initiatives (such as the $57 million that was spent to defeat California's Proposition 45 in 2014), (6) paying dividends to shareholders (people lucky enough to have extra money to invest), and (7) exorbitant pay to executives. And now everyone is legally required to buy this exceedingly wasteful product.
America. Where you're free to choose between many redundant health insurance bureaucracies that exist to distribute your money to their rich owners.
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from Ken