Somehow, I missed this, as it came out a couple weeks ago. Mort Kondracke repeats a number of issues (which I’ve posted about on this blog) surrounding a Governmental Single-Payer Health Insurance System modeled after Original Medicare.
Mort discusses how a Single Payor, by dictating fee schedules for Hospitals and Physicians which are 30% and 20%, respectively, less than Private Insurance, along with other competitive advantages like having zero cost of capital, not paying taxes, not making profits, not paying for Administrative costs such as disease management, network management, etc., would create an uneven playing field versus for profit insurers or even non profit insurers like Blues plans.
Further, if more “Private Pay” insurance members would migrate to a public plan which dictates lower fee schedules, this would put more pressure on Health Care providers to charge Private Insurers higher fees to make up for lower government payments. This would tilt the playing field even more in favor of a government plan and hasten the overall move toward Government run Health care.
