Go read this very smart piece. Nation writer Josh Holland on why:
There’s a common perception that because single-payer systems cost so much less than ours, passing such a scheme here would bring our spending in line with what the rest of the developed world shells out. But while there would be some savings on administrative costs, this gets the causal relationship wrong. Everyone else established their systems when they weren’t spending a lot on health care, and then kept prices down through aggressive cost-controls.
“Bringing costs down is a lot harder than starting low and keeping them from getting high,” says Baker. “We do waste money on [private] insurance, but we also pay basically twice as much for everything. We pay twice as much to doctors. Would single-payer get our doctors to accept half as much in wages? It could, but they won’t go there without a fight. This is a very powerful group. We have 900,000 doctors, all of whom are in the top 2 percent, and many are in the top 1 percent. We pay about twice as much for prescription drugs as other countries. Medical equipment, the whole list. You could get those costs down, but that’s not done magically by saying we’re switching to single payer. You’re going to have fights with all of these powerful interest groups.”
Baker is himself a single-payer advocate, and he’s worked with various groups that advocate for it, but, he says, “I don’t think you can get there overnight. I think you have to talk about doing it piecemeal, step-by-step.”
We start by getting rid of the health insurance industry, which adds millions of dollars in unnecessary costs to the system.
Do we really need the expense of CEO salaries?
Why do we need stockholders skimming the profits off the top?
Costs of Medical School can go down w/o unwonted subsidies to insurers. Costs of drugs? They use med school data in drug discovery, I thinl a lot of that could be recouped. Just look at who buys most advertising: drug companies and insurance companies – discretionary spending up the wazoo. But yeah about 30 40 % of medical overhead is due to administration. Best practices and committee medicine (advanced by the single-payer government agency) would knock down the need for and cost of malpractice insurance/ After all, you need to pay doctor bills that are so high, so malpractice claims are high, therefore malpractice insurance rates are high. It’s all tied together.
I’ve recently gotten a working TV after more than a decade without, and was amazed at the ridiculous number of drug and insurance ads, just like you say. Car ads are also very frequent.