Yes sir, Mr. Printcraft made me feel right at home. And he was smiling and waving at me the whole time, and he didn't use purple either.
Hey, I'll stand in line to get my free government gun.
Like it or not, you're already paying for everyone else as it is. You pay for everyone else in Medicare/Medicaid taxes. You pay for everyone else in private insurance premiums. You definitely pay for everyone else when you get your bill from the ER for $40,000 for a cast and some x-rays. We all engage in risk pooling already, so that we can each benefit from it when our time comes. Almost nobody in this country genuinely pays for their own healthcare only, and nobody else's.
As it is, ERs are already required to provide at least some basic treatment to people who can't pay, and that money is taken out of your hide through this arcane, ridiculous system of overcharging and negotiating. There are more middlemen in healthcare than any other industry in the country. If there was one single private insurer with a massive risk pool who paid 100% of your healthcare expenses with no deductibles or co-pays for a monthly premium at or below what you're paying now, wouldn't you want to sign on to that policy? Wouldn't it be cheaper and better than what you have now, because they have a risk pool of 325 million people and no middlemen? And would it really matter to you, the end user, if that insurer is a government agency instead of a corporation that takes a profit cut for themselves?
[You have not adequately considered that having a single insurer (ne:single payer or at least payment decision maker) will recreate the problems we have now. There are still no methods in place in that system to reign in the profit motives of providers nor provide any modicum of transparency to allow comparison shopping. It is likely that the middle men, being rent seekers, will simply move to the gov't/insuror side of the equation and there is also no system in place to keep it from happening. Throw in a guarantee to pay all bills by the US gov't and you simply change the mathematics of the boondoggle, not the outcomes. Should you empower the government to directly control the behaviors that increase its cost, it will likely be the greatest loss of liberty and expansion of government power in living memory.]
Always seemed like a no-brainer to me. The system as it exists now is lunacy. It's like an ancient car that you've spent 60 years jerry-rigging with duct tape and twine. Nobody designed it this way, it's a mess of big changes and little changes that several generations of politicians, insurers, and provider networks have made, and that's why it's so ludicrously expensive. Vertical integration is why Walmart's stuff is cheap. No reason it can't work for healthcare.
['Vertical integration' brings its own problems. It was already the case, before some constraints were enacted, that if a doctor or group of doctors owned labs and imaging centers (vertical integration) that curiously enough their patients needed a lot of tests and those tests were referred to the captive labs and imaging centers. You may have noticed that even now your doctor is quite interested in providing referrals for ancillary testing or care. That is because referrals are a huge log-rolling, back-scratching , rain-making scheme. It is quite likely already true that if your doctor is part of a group practice or hospital system owned practice that he is already (hopefully) forced to consider you as a profit center as well as a patient. At worst, he skips the '... as a patient part'. This will not magically get better because the government is paying all the bills]
National insurance systems work very well. Providers are still private, people are still free to make their own choices, outcomes are better, and premiums/taxes are cheaper. Beats sending hundreds and hundreds of dollars a month to an insurer who won't even lift a finger until I pay another $3,500 in deductible. I'd just as soon spend that money on premiums for a national insurance program and go to sleep knowing I won't get wiped out by bills if I get hit by a drunk driver tomorrow.
Regarding the broken purple button, I'll just repeat what an infamous INGOer once said to me: "We've upped our game, now, UP YOURS!"
