I know this has been the standard line on the topic from the industry for a while, but it seems so amazing that they can't see the irony of this statement. Private Medical care is--they admit--only profitable because they are able to deny coverage to people who actually get sick, i.e. they basically just sit around and make money off of the premiums paid by people who don't use it. They are willing to provide care for sick people care if their profits are subsidized: 1) through mandates, by people who don't have insurance because they don't get sick and 2) by everyone through direct government subsidies on the sick people. So this has all the costs of socialized medicine, but none of the benefits?
Administrative costs within the plans would remain--and grow with the intense marketing that would be undertaken to mop up the new set of mandated insurees. The different interest groups are simply vying for some sort of directive which will give them control over the other interest groups--all trying to split up the expanded pie of the feudal dues and monopoly rents of controlling access and the cost of, well, basically, of life. In the end, profits would be subsidized by the average citizen through mandated premiums or taxpayer subsidized care.
The difference between this and single payer is therefore mostly semantic--and the fact that, built into one there supposedly MUST be some sort of profit for private industry. That this canard remains despite the industry itself admitting that the profits are representative of its central dysfunction--i.e. they come from it *not* providing health care--is a uniquely American form of stupidity.
s