I talk about Medicare Advantage because it lets you do an apples-to-apples comparison of a government run program (Medicare--that's not obscure) with essentially the same program run by private insurers (Medicare Advantage). Many, many people have used this same comparison -- for the same apples-to-apples reason -- to try to prove that a government run program is cheaper.

If you want to compare private insurance with not just a government insurance program, like Medicare, but an entirely government run health system, like the VA or the UK's, that is a totally different issue. For better or worse, nationalizing the entire health care system is not and will not be on anybody's agenda in the US.

I don't know what a comparison with Medicaid would look like. Medicaid may indeed be cheaper. Maybe much cheaper. That's because Medicaid's reimbursement rates are much lower. You can find any number of stories in the press that will detail how that results in many places in sub-standard care and lack of any reasonable access to specialists. The fact that many children get this sub-standard care because they are poor and rely on an underfunded program is a genuine scandal.

MG