Last week, when Bernie Sanders unveiled his new plan for single-payer healthcare in America, one of the biggest sins he laid at the feet of the insurance industry was its wastefulness. Much of what we spend on healthcare in this country pads the pockets of insurance executives and their companies’ shareholders, he pointed out, while many Americans skip doctors’ visits and forgo treatment even when they have insurance, because they can’t afford co-pays and deductibles.
“Layers of bureaucracy associated with the administration of hundreds of individual and complicated insurance plans is stunningly wasteful, costing us hundreds of billions of dollars a year,” Sanders wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times.
Indeed, by one measure, administrative costs account for more than 8 percent of spending on healthcare in the United States, more than double the average of industrialized countries around the world. Sanders’s plan proposes a more streamlined, government-run system that would put the needs of people first, and he promises to do it in four short years if everything goes his way—which, of course, it won’t.
Read the full article here: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3kabqb/the-single-payer-problem-liberals-dont-want-to-talk-about