That would be nice if true but it simply isn't. I've had this discussion several times on this forums. Insurance company overhead is around 12% of total healthcare costs with profit being around 3%. Realistically, how much better do you think the government will do? Please don't use medicare as a comparison because the pool of patients and the services they get is completely different than in other insurance markets.
Actually I disagree with your numbers. the actual cost is not the 15 percent you claim but at least about 20 percent. A lot of the discrepancy comes from self insured companies and the insurance companies that administer them.
A large corporation often assumes the "risk" of health insurance themselves. They do buy some "reinsurance" to protect themselves if costs are far higher in a particular year. In these cases they pay a health insurance company to pay the claims. The health insurance company works on a virtually guaranteed, but low profit.
The health insurance companies therefore can show a lot less in expenses, such as advertising the plan, monitoring fraud, etc than they do if they were performing the duties of a real insurance plan.
The health insurance companies roll these plans into their total numbers artificially bringing down the overhead and profit they attribute to thier health plans.
In reality, when they are performing real health insurance the percentage they keep of the premiums is about 20 percent not including self insured plans.
Now as to Medicare,you can't just dismiss it as it being different. What is different about Medicare? You point to the "pool of patients" which can mean anything. As to services being different, once again you don't define what that is. In fact, at the least, Medicare covers some things private insurance usually doesn't like motorized wheelchairs. These types of unusual claims actually cost more to process than your standard doctors office visit.
Medicare actually processes claims for about 2-3 percent of overhead. Now, remember that Medicare is actually paying private health insurance plans to process their claims. And these private companies are making a profit on this low amount.
So, by going to a single payer that was as efficient as Medicare we would save well over ten percent on health costs a year. Thats a staggering number.
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