Reply #89: Willfully ignoring the insurance industry's true cost

[Spike89]

A huge gap in your argument is the lack of accounting for the huge number of people currently "priced out" of health care today. To keep this simple, you do know that hospitals admit and treat lots of injured/sick people without insurance or means to pay, right? You do know that doctors and hospitals get "stiffed" on a fair percentage of cases? You probably know that most doctors will work with and offer significantly lower prices to patients without the ability to pay in full. The point here is that if a 20% of your clientele pays nothing, another 20% pays "below the rate card", and the rest are on insurance that has a vested interest in high rates/payouts...well, that insurance isn't going to be a good deal.
Even simpler, if I'm selling kool-aid that costs me a nickel a cup and I need to clear a penny per cup to stay in business, I can charge 6 cents. But, if I am obligated to provide free kool-aid to anyone that is "emergency-level" thirsty, and I care enough to make sure thirsty kids can get the kool-aid they need so I sell it at 3 cents to them--well, I'm simply going to have to charge much more than 6 cents to those that have drink insurance. Because the drink insurance company needs to "profit" the thirsty population must pay even a bit more, which means some have to drop coverage, meaning I'm providing more free kool-aid, meaning I've got to charge more from the few that are paying, which means the insurance company must charge more...this goes until it breaks.
Go single payer and everyone pays less, it sounds too good to be true, but it is. The insurance company's have incredible redundancy, huge overhead, and large profits--take them out and that is a huge gain. Most of what they currently provide simply doesn't need to be, and the rest can be handled for a fraction of the cost by the government.