>>>(Medicare and such) had only 2% overhead cost.
>
>I have heard the same - very very low overhead, and it does not quite ring true.
>I did some work for a bureaucracy, and they were proud that they only consumed 20% as they passed the money from one layer of government to the next layer.
>
>However, even if somehow this is actually an efficient government program, Medicare is easier to defraud than private insurers precisely because it is good at spending money with so little human attention.

OTOH, multitude of insurers and multitude of medical shops (for lack of better word) create a huge forest of billing systems, each with their own lookup tables, which is guaranteed to eat a lot of money by its nature.

I almost got a job at a company which replaces insurance by just mediating (and data massaging) between the payers (i.e. businesses) and medical shops and lives on the percentage of savings they create (compared to insurance). And they seemed to be faring quite well, while still saving money to both sides.