"We have 900 billing clerks at Duke. I'm not sure we have a nurse per bed, but we have a billing clerk per bed... it's obscene."

Dr. Uwe E. Reinhardt,
Describing the overhead in the Duke Medical System at the
Hearing on Health Care Reform, U.S. Senate Finance Committee, November 19, 2008

The chair of that finance committee, Senator Max Baucus of Montana, says the system needs reform, but he's opposed to the key point in the President's plan: providing a single-payer alternative.  You have to wonder why, since that's for all intents and purposes the insurance the Senator and his Congressional colleagues have.

A single-payer system is not in the best interest of the big insurance companies: The reason we spend more in the U.S. and get less than the rest of the world? A myriad of for-profit payers earning a comfortable living by sucking cash out of your health-care dollars. 31% of current costs go to overhead, fully half of that is right to "administrative costs" billing, sales and marketing departments, huge profits, and disgraceful executive pay.

Half of all personal bankruptcy filings in the U.S. are triggered by medical costs that insurance doesn't cover.

Hospitals, clinics, and physicians in private practice spend ridiculous amounts of money paying the staffs that interact with big insurange, and we pay in increased charges for their services. Insurance is business, and business is about making a profit, so the incentives for the CEOs have little to do with controlling costs of services - that they pass right along - the only costs they worry about are the ones that affect their bottom line. To control that cost, they make it hard to process claims, and they deny coverage to anybody the actuaries say isn't going to turn a profit.

Patients regain absolute choice and more of the money we spend goes to actual health care if we adopt a single-payer system. It's the obvious way to recapture the money we currently pay to an industry that adds no value, yet puts control over medical decisions in the hands of bureaucrats and business analysts interested in only their own bottom line. The money potentially saved just by reducing paperwork, more than $350 billion per year according to some estimates, is enough to provide comprehensive coverage to everyone without paying any more than we already do.

"Medicare has administrative costs between about 2 to 3 percent whereas private insurance varies considerably across different markets but averages about 14 to 15 percent."

Bradley Herring, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, The Johns Hopkins University, Potential Complications with the Different Approaches to Health Reform

The President is trying to introduce a choice - a system whereby if you can't get reasonable coverage at a reasonable price through your employer, you can use a system modeled after Medicare, where overhead costs run 2-3% instead of the over 30% that private insurers typically charge us.

Here are some additional resources to rely on if you're trying to figure out the differences between socialized medicine and single-payer administration, or any of the other misconceptions floating around in the media:

• Answers to frequently asked questions (faq) about single-payer healthcare.
• "Liberal benefits, Conservative spending." A downloadable introduction.
• A bibliography of papers exploring single-payer systems.

Asked to react to Obama's proposal to move to single-payer health care system in his address to the nation, Nobel Prize winning economist ProfessorJoseph Stiglitz said he's reluctantly concluded, "It's the only way."

"...what we’ve seen is that the private healthcare insurers do not know how to deliver an efficient way."

World Bank Chief Economist, Joseph Stiglitz