A better estimate for savings from some parts of the industry is revenue not profit. That’s because the work done by, for example, insurance companies is largely useless paper shuffling that doesn’t need to exist under single payer.
Edit: oh yeah, and marketing. So much health industry money ends up in marketing. Something almost completely unnecessary under single-payer as well.
The post I was replying to was talking about wealth transfer from people to shareholders. Profit is the proper measure of that.
As to cost savings, you can’t use insurance industry revenue because that includes money spent on services. And a lot of the “paper shuffling” does need to exist under single payer. Most universal healthcare systems aren’t nationalized systems like the UK NHS. Germany for example has mandatory membership in Public health insurance organizations for those making under 60,000 euro. There are 100+ of those. Then 15% of the population has private health insurance. Care providers are mostly private. So there is still medical billing that needs to be done. Most EU countries are similar in that regard, and unlike the UK NHS.
As to marketing, now you’re talking about a drop in the bucket. Pharma industry advertising adds up to just $6 billion per year.
I support pretty much any solution that provides guaranteed access to effective acute care (the fact that the ER can’t legally turn you away doesn’t mean it’s effective care).
But people who advocate for this position (which, again, I believe in) all too often live in a fantasy world where we can magically switch systems and pay less. If we keep paying US medical personnel their prevailing wages, there is no way we’re going to lower costs.
Nurses and doctors are too popular in the US to ever even suggest that we reduce their wages to European levels.
Acute care, including the ER, is a small fraction of the total cost of health care. If the health care problem was simply ensuring everyone access to a GP's office and an ER for emergencies, we'd have solved it by now.
Providing effective and low cost chronic care is an unsolved problem everywhere.
I can’t say that I support any and all entitlement schemes I’ve ever heard for chronic care, is why I was singling our acute care, where I do, but you’re right that I was mixing up arguments.
But of course when you provide low cost acute care, and don’t cover chronic conditions, there’s strong pressure for chronic problems to wait until they’re acute and harder to solve, and for chronic patients to use the acute system very inefficiently.
Edit: oh yeah, and marketing. So much health industry money ends up in marketing. Something almost completely unnecessary under single-payer as well.