“They say, 'oh, look at the cost… as a percentage of spending in Medicare as opposed to the private plans,' which is not what you really want to look at. You want to look at the cost per enrollee. And if you look at that, then you see that the private plans are as good or better than these other plans.”
Newt's World · US Politics · October 2026
Context
He takes on the claim that single-payer would cut administrative costs, arguing the usual comparison uses the wrong denominator. Whether per-enrollee or percent-of-spending is the right measure is the part readers can argue with.
Transcript
…proposals from Sanders and his fellow travelers. You're going to be more like Canada where it's banned. So Canada has struggled under the system for years. They tried all kinds of things, but it's something that requires tremendous political courage to to change. So we'll see what happens there.
…fell to 52%. When they were told it could threaten the current Medicare program, it fell to 38%. When they were told they'd pay higher taxes, it dropped to 35%. And then when they were told it could delay medical tests and treatments, it dropped to 24%. Shouldn't that be a fairly easy campaign?
Well, it is. I mean, the problem is you have people like Dr. El-Said who are, let's say, slippery on this issue. You know, when you ask them, what does the plan actually entail? they claim it does something which is untrue. They insist that you'll still be able to buy private insurance, but that's not the legislative proposal. It never has been the legislative proposal. They also try to elide the issue of the tax increases and the costs by claiming this is going to save money because we'll get rid of all sorts of inefficiencies. Whereas the fact of the matter is, There's absolutely no reason to believe that this will be a more efficient plan. In fact, I think we know pretty well that most government-owned and run plans in any industry are far more inefficient than privately run plans. And there's also the question of administrative costs that they erroneously claim will go down. And what they try to do here is they say, oh, look at the cost per spending of as a percentage of spending in Medicare as opposed to the private plans, which is not what you really want to look at. You want to…
Isn't Medicare Advantage, in a sense, actually a step away from the traditional bureaucratic government-imposed system?
Well, look, Medicare Advantage gives people choices. They can choose from a number of plans, try to pick the one that they think works best for them. So it enables them to have those sorts of choices. No one forces them into Medicare Advantage. They can still choose traditional Medicare. but it…
Back when we fought over Hillary Care in the 1990s, a number of the biggest employers actually favored Hillary Care because they wanted to dump all of the health costs under the government and get it off their particular books. Do you sense much of that here? I mean, what kind of support outside…
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