Medicare’s Administrative Cost — The Last Word, I Hope →
Here is a brief review of the literature: Robert Book discovered that reported Medicare’s administrative costs per patient (not as a percentage of the bills) were actually higher than private insurance. A Milliman study concluded that when all costs are considered (including the cost of tax collection) Medicare’s cost as a percent of total spending is 66% higher than private insurance. Ben Zycher concludes that a government run system would have higher administrative costs than a private system. And Tom Saving and I showed (based on CBO numbers) that Medicare has not been more successful that the private section in holding down costs — as Krugman, Robert Reich and others have claimed.
This entry was tagged. Healthcare Policy