And IMO health care isn't owed to anyone, you have to earn it, just like everything else. The problem governments have gotten involved and skewed the market so bad prices have went sky high.
Canadians pay for their health care through taxes. We simply dont allow middle men such as insurance companies to take their pound of flesh. The US system has more services by simply removing 20 percent of the population from the system. Even most Americans who hate Obama care love medicaid (read canadian style government funded medicare) which is simply bizarre. All children everywhere should have a right to health care INHO.
Insurane companies, not government is driving up the price. Everyone knows a windshield replaced by cash costs half as much as an insurance claim.......even in the US.
The data do not show that rising health care costs are due to insurance companies. The majority of Americans get their private healthcare insurance through non-profit healthcare insurers. On average these insurers spend about 10% of premiums to run their companies and perform administrative functions and some are more efficient at about 7 percent. They have a low rate of fraud, roughly one to one and a half percent. If you add it all together that gives about 11 percent for overhead. That means about 89 percent of premiums go to actual care.
If we look at Medicare in the US, the cost of processing claims and membership (done by private insurers contracted by the government) is about three percent. Then you need to add the cost of running CMS (Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services). the cost of the IRS collecting the premiums and the cost of congressional and other government oversight. If you add all this up (the government won't actually supply this number) you get probably something over ten percent. However, Medicare fraud is 1000% higher than in the private sector so you have to add another 15% or so to the 10% admin costs. This gives a conservative total of over 20% administrative costs and fraud/waste. So for Medicare, less than 80% of premiums go to pay for actual care. And Medicare provides a single one size fits all product in contrast to private insurers who provide hundreds of different products.
Thus, Medicare is actually less efficient than non-profit private health insurance and a lower percentage of premiums (and tax dollars) are spent on actual care. I would note that for-profit insurers (Aetna, Cigna, Humana etc.) usually spend a lower percent of premiums on actual care because they spend a lot on advertising. My guess is that costs for Canadian health care are similar to Medicare though I don't have the figures to prove it. I don't doubt that the government will claim greater efficiency by not including all the costs (this is what government health care proponents do in the US, they only include claims and membership costs and don't include the other costs or the fraud) but if you add up ALL the costs it is likely not terribly efficient simply because government programs are rarely efficient.
The percent of premiums spent on actual care by private insurers has remained relatively constant over the last few decades while the cost of healthcare has increased dramatically. The reason is that the cost of care itself has increased. A major reason for this is that many things are possible now due to new technology that couldn't be done thirty years ago. Innovation in medicine costs lots of money and so all these new treatments and technology drive up the cost of health care. Defensive medicine and other factors also contribute but I don't think they are the primary drivers of health care inflation.
Finally, much (but not all) of innovation in medicine worldwide comes from the US. We in the US pay the bill for much of medical innovation that then gets used in other countries. This is a major reason why drugs cost less in Canada and other countries. Most new drugs come from the US and due to patent laws, this cost is mostly borne by US consumers who in effect subsidize other countries that charge less for the drugs.
It's all quite complicated but just saying that health care is expensive because of insurance companies is inaccurate.
