I keep hearing here about how I’m just falling into a liberal meme by saying that the insurance and pharmaceutical industries don’t actually have our interests at heart. I’m just attacking “big pharma” as portrayed by the evil anti-business liberals, etc, etc…

I’ve been pointedly rebuked by the argument that the insurance companies on average make only 2-3% net profit. Of course this completely ignores the fact that they are universally all publically held companies that pay out stock dividends and other liabilities ahead of that “net profit.”

The actual figure that the companies “eat” as overhead is over 23% of every dollar paid to them. Now multiply that buy the hundreds of companies, overall the numbers don’t look good. Less than 49 cents of every dollar spent on medical care in this country actually goes to pay for medical procedures. The other 51 cents goes to “administration costs” and profits of those other than the doctors.

Medicare/medicaid manages to survive with only about 3% overhead, almost 97 cents of every dollar actually goes to a doctor who performed some procedure. If you can’t see a problem with this I don’t know what else I can say to persuade you.

Medical care should not be reliant solely on private enterprise profit, nor should the entire country be facing bankruptcy by the continued double digit increase in rates every single year.