large portion of this cost to Medicare's overhead, arriving at an estimate that overhead consumes 52% of total Medicare spending. First, his estimate of the economic consequences of taxation is questionable at best. His assumption that the taxes raised for NHI would come from investment, not from existing health care expenditures, is unfounded. Its simply crazy to posit that money flowing to health care through private insurers provides strikingly more stimulus to the economy than the exact same amount flowing through a government insurance plan. 3-Private insurers' overhead is not really wasteful. Zycher admits that Medicare and NHI achieve large savings on underwriting, advertising etc. But he argues that these activities are good things because they "align premiums with costs", stop the healthy from cross-subsidizing the sick, and make everybody pay the true costs of their own care. He assumes that a market-based health insurance system -- which minimizes risk pooling and cross-subsidies - must be most efficient. Therefore, the costs of administering such a market are, by definition, not waste but a necessary part of efficiency. Of course, he does not and cannot adduce any evidence that a market-based health insurance system is actually efficient. In fact, the overwhelming evidence indicates that it is far less efficient than NHI. 4-What Zycher leaves out. Zycher's arguments completely ignore the massive administrative waste that private insurers inflict on hospitals, doctors, nursing homes etc. In fact, insurance overhead accounts for only one-quarter of total health care administrative costs in the U.S. The