That why i usually keep to the insurance example, i agree that comparing municipality power to private companies owning a monopoly is unfair.

Administrative costs for insurance are very easy to verify, and the facts stay consistent across countries. If i cherry picked something, it is the admin overhead for US insurers. US health care insurers are particulary effective with their average of 14% admin overhead, SwissLife, that used to be my private insurer, had a year with 30%, which make the comparison quite unfair).

This doesn't seem to be relevant to the comment you replied to. They didn't mention anything about paying less to pharmaceutical companies, they argued that the administrative overhead of providing the insurance itself is lower.

As I read it, your argument seems to be that American healthcare must be more expensive than similar-quality healthcare elsewhere because we're paying higher pharmaceutical prices to fund research. If we accept that premise, shouldn't that mean that: 1. The "medicine" portion of costs increases, causing the total cost to increase 2. Administrative effort, and therefore absolute cost, remains the same (we're paying X% more for drugs, not thinking X% harder about whether a given drug is needed by a given patient) 3. Administrative overhead as a percentage of total cost should be lower given a similar efficiency level, because higher drug prices inflated the divisor (total cost) while having no effect on the dividend (administrative costs)