SACRAMENTO - When Blue Cross sells health insurance to someone who isn't covered at work, the company typically makes a 27 percent profit. By the time salaries and other administrative costs are accounted for, only half the money the company collects in premiums from that person goes for medical care.

Those figures may help explain why Blue Cross - the insurance provider for roughly one in four people in the state who have health coverage, and with political heft in the Capitol to match - so far is the only major insurer opposing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's universal health care plan...

"The idea that you have to sell health insurance to any comer is antithetical to their business model," said Peter Harbage, a health care expert at the non-partisan New America Foundation who has advised the governor. "It's not how they make money..."

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