I saw this comment on the Institute for Public Accuracy live blog of Obama's speech, which is just starting.

 

Doug Henwood:

A friend pointed out to me earlier today that the market capitalization--the value of all the outstanding stock--of the publicly traded health insurers is about $150 billion. Add a little premium to sweeten the pot and you could nationalize the lot of them for about $200 billion. The total administrative costs of the U.S. healthcare system, which are greatly inflated by all the paperwork and second-guessing of docs' decisions generated by the insurance industry, are about $400 billion a year. Those administrative costs are about three times what a Canadian-style single payer system would cost. So that means we'd save about $250 billion a year by eliminating the waste caused by our private insurance system.

In other words, the nationalization could pay for itself in well under a year.

That's as simple an explanation as you're going to get. America buying healthcare is roughly the equivalent -- in terms of 'common sense' -- of you going down to Rent-A-Center to get your flat screen television at 400 percent interest.

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