John Menadue and Ian McAuley look at how government handouts to the private health insurance industry put subsidies to the auto industry in the shade.

This paper presents the case for a single national health insurer to replace the 38 private insurers now operating in the market. Although there would be scale economies, primarily in administration costs, in a single national insurer, such savings would be modest. The case for a single insurer rests on the intrinsic problems associated with...