Persnickety

From Economist.com (Mar 9, 2009, "The view from West Virginia"): [Obama] insists that Americans who like the health insurance they currently get through their employer can keep it. But Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank, predicts that government insurance will crowd out private insurance. The government could offer insurance cheaply by dumping part of the cost on future taxpayers, and so crush its private competitors. If that happens, hospitals will be squeezed. Currently, patients with private insurance cross-subsidise those in government schemes. (A typical hospital enjoys a profit margin of 48% on each privately insured patient and suffers a 44% loss on each patient covered by Medicaid, the government programme for the poor, according to McKinsey, a consultancy.) If that subsidy disappears because there are fewer private patients left to pay it, hospitals will have to cut back. European-style queues may form, the sceptics fret. Firstly, why woul...