Single Payer Profits for Insurance Companies

I just did a tour of the country looking for potential Independent Congressional candidates.

One highlight of my trip was a discussing with an Executive of a health insurance claims processing company. When I asked him how bad would a single payer, government run, system hurt his business; he just laughed. He educated me on the fact that his company and most of the big insurance companies would benefit from a single payer system.

See Medicaid and Medicare claims aren't processed by a building full of civil servants. No, the government subcontracts it out to the insurance companies to manage. The single payer system would end up being the same model. This part of the business is the most profitable and consistent. Unlike the insurance side where there is a lot of risk, this side of the business is easily forcasted. See, the risk now would fall on the tax payers and be managed by the government. This will be a huge win fall for a few of the insurance companies and the rest will fall off planet, reducing any potential competition completely.

So, in the end, are we really going to be making the big bad Insurance Industry pay? Or, are we going to do what we did on Wall Street? Let the government pick the winners and the losers and let the average U.S. citizen pay the price.