America will not have a modern healthcare system until it gets its outdated gold standard thinking out of the way. The concept of "paying for" something that costs less to the collective is at the root of almost all of our economic deficiencies and will remain so as long as corporate profits are the main concern of lawmakers.
When the currency issuing government pays for things that benefit the society it makes no real difference what that thing costs, although it also presents the currency issuer as the price setter. The savings potential of a single payer system is well documented and undeniable, especially where such a high profit, but unnecessary, factor as insurance is included.
The economists I know project that transitioning to a single payer system would actually be "deflationary" immediately due to the number of people employed solely to navigate the many varieties and brands of insurance in the marketplace. Most of these are employed by the actual providers of healthcare just to enable that they be paid for their efforts. These people would be involuntarily unemployed and would require retraining and replacement.
The numbers and their eventual cost in aggregate would suggest that even allowing consumers to keep their present insurance premium expenses as added demand in the economy might not be enough to provide for their education and placement in new employment. Such conditions normally create large federal expenditures via automatic safety nets which would be on top of any expenditure the states would require with their meager unemployment policies.
In spite of this more than obvious economic reality, any discussion of expanding federal healthcare programs immediately initiates debate of how to "pay for" the expense of doing so via taxing demand "out of" the economy needlessly as if the ability to create currency on demand was not real for the federal government. This is quite intentional and it serves the purpose of the corporate overlords that now own our Congress quite well. Getting past the "pay for" debate, which isn't even applicable to our federal government's monetary system, is the roadblock to all policy beneficial to the middle class and poor in America.
