Advocates in the Obama administration, the mainstream media, and congressional Democrats routinely claim that a government-run health insurance program would have lower administrative costs than those of the private sector.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, for example, puts it this way: “But it’s a fact that insurers spend a lot of money looking for ways to reject insurance claims. And health care providers, in turn, spend billions on “denial management,” employing specialist firms — including Ingenix, a subsidiary of, yes, UnitedHealth — to fight the insurers.”