Several months ago I wrote a post about how we don’t always get what pay for in regards to healthcare. To follow-up on that theme, today I came across an article detailing how private insurers are better than government insurers in controlling expenditure growth.
Supporters of a single-payer system have long touted the fact that Medicare and Medicaid process claims cheaper than commercial payers but as pointed out by Avik Roy for Frobes.com, even these figures are misleading.
So, if private, commercial payers are better at controlling expenditure growth AND are more efficiently administratively, why are we still talking about a single-payer system?
(We still need to deal with profit motivation / maximization and neither of the two studies compare expenditures and administrative costs to the growth in premiums but those are topics for another post.)
