[quote=SK in CV][quote=no_such_reality]
For major health insurance companies like United Health Group cost of services is 65%. Profit, administration, marketing, etc is 35%. UH is a fairly good company.

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Not sure where those numbers are coming from. By law, the medical loss ratio for qualified health plans must be at least 80% for individual and small group policies and 85% for large group policies. If MLR is lower than those numbers, premiums must be rebated.

Not an entirely fair comparison since Medicare spends almost nothing on premium collection or sales, but Medicare overhead is less than 2%[/quote]

It comes from UHG’s 10-K. It’s across all their business lines. The ACA law requires the 80% to be for health care claims and quality improvements for credible plans.

The part that is really obscured is how much of the cost of providing services, the part paid to providers, is administrative costs from dealing with all the different insurance companies, billing requirements and authorizations etc.

I don’t think there will be clear numbers between the efficiency/inefficiency of the Government bureaucracy versus private corporation bureaucracy and inefficiency and induced bureaucracy in the providers.