One appeal made on behalf of single-payer health care proposals is cost savings. Rep. Pete Stark (D-California), for example, touts a "2 percent" administrative cost of Medicare as a reason for expanding public programs. You may find state legislators making a similar argument.

But can government run a health care program cheaply? As I argue in the San Francisco Examiner, "Unfortunately, Stark’s numbers are wrong. Oh, the Medicare trustees do say that administrative costs are roughly 2 percent. The problem is that figure excludes billions of dollars of what any private sector company would count as administrative costs."

"Medicare not only excludes most of its true administrative costs, it offloads administrative costs on the private sector."

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