Rep. Campbell's anecdote is an interesting one, but I saw an interesting study on CNN (?) about health care costs in the US the other night.

Although obesity and smoking were the two most expensive outlays for health care costs, there are massive outlays for completing health insurance forms and of course auditing them as well. Apparently, Medicare must deal with 800+ separate health care plans at any given time. These plans exist under the banner of "free enterprise" but in reality, the Health insurers, not the governement, are the ones who are making the life and death dterminations of what are acceptable medical costs. I'm not sure why people think that for-profit companies can do a more compassionate job of "determining" covered expenses than the government could.

Anyway, all these plans have managers, and they have bosses, etc. etc. and it wuld be interesting to know how many health care workers ("Managers") proportionately, are employed for the private-payer system. This would include both the costs to the insurance companies, but also to the private companies that have to monitor their employee plans, as well as payroll employees who need to calculate each employee's deductions, etc.

Then are there are insurance corporations' "plan" salespeople, the hundreds of millions spent on advertising and lobbying, and the outrageous salaries of insurance compnay execs. In 2005, the Heathcare economist reported that the head of United Health Care received compensation of $124.8 million dollars. In 1996, United Health payed it's top exec $2.7 Million, and the very top earner in 1996, Oxford Health Care paid $29 million to is CEO.

On top of that, factor in that "tort reform" doesn't make a lot of sense as long as hundreds of private companies are running the show. After all, there are bound to be a number of bad apples whop are gaming the system or who are blatently unqualified.

I haven't seen such a side-by-side comparison, but all indication seem to say that we spend more per-capita for our health care system than most other industrialized nations.