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.

Here are some more numbers for recent (Aug 2009) market cap for the big insurers. It is simply stunning to think that we waste so much money so that, comparatively speaking, a few people can make so little. It is also stunning to think that the billions of "value" that the health insurers represent is a tiny drop compared to the trillions we'll waste over the next decade because we are forced to follow the religion of "the free market" for a "product" that isn't exchangeable.

Aetna $12.3b market cap

American Independence Corp. $40.4m market cap

AMERIGROUP Corp.  $4.3b market cap

Amerisafe $317m market cap

Assurant, Inc. $3.3b market cap

CIGNA Corp.$7.9b market cap

Coventry Health Care, Inc.$3.4b market cap

Health Net, Inc.$1.5b market cap

Humana, Inc. $5.9b market cap

Molina Healthcare, Inc. $508m market cap

Triple-S Management Corp. $335m market cap

UnitedHealth Group, Inc. $32.6b market cap

Universal American Corp. $702m market cap

WellCare Health Plans, Inc. $1.0b market cap

Well Point, Inc. $25.1b market cap