by Shannon Brownlee Paul Krugman’s column on the wisdom of universal health care says Medicare-for-all would be more efficient than the system we have now. He’s right, but maybe not right enough. Medicare currently claims that something on the order of less than 5 percent of its costs go towards administration – bureaucratic overhead. That’s in stark contrast to the private insurance system’s 30 percent overhead. Some economists think Medicare is less efficient than it claims to be, but let’s say, for the sake of argument that a universal Medicare system woudl be about as efficient as Canada’s system, which pays about 15 percent in overhead. How much would we save? Well, only about half of our health care is paid for through private insurance (gov’t picks up the tab for Medicare, Medicaid, the Veterans Administration, and military personnel and some family members). So if I’m doing the math right,
