Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Hostile Takeover...Health Care

From chapter 6 of David Sirota's Hostile Takeover on Health Care...

According to a study by top experts in 2005, "the United States wastes more on [private] health-care bureacracy than it would cost to provide health care to all its uninsured." That's right - wastes. As the World Health Organization noted in a separate report, 15 cents of every dollar Americans spend on private health insurance goes to administrative expenses. The term "administrative expenses" is a euphenism for the costs incurred by Corporate America's quest for profits: that's everything from filling out and processing insurance paperwork to padding HMO executives' salaries. By contrast, when the government spends money on public health care programs like Medicare, those administrative expenses consume only about 4 cents of every dollar.
And after discussing different propoals of universal health care later in the chapter...
Remember, none of these proposals even take into account the amount that many businesses would save with a universal health care system. Consider General Motors. "In 2003 it costs of building a midsize car in Canada were $1,400 less than building the identical car in the United States, " wrote former Washington Post reporter Morton Mintz, now head of the Investigative Journalism Fun.
Read more from Hostile Takeover...
Introduction
Jobs
Wages
Debt
Pensions

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

As if general motors would pass along the saving to us.