You obviously have no idea how insurance works. It is socialism with a profit added on. Risk management benefits from the largest pool possible, which is everyone. The government already pays over half of all healthcare billing in the US, and even more when you add in premium subsidies for government employees in the market.
The concept that you don’t pay for other people’s healthcare now is only evidence that you are uninformed or disingenuous. Hospitals and other providers would go broke immediately if they didn’t incorporate the cost of unpaid billing, much of it due to insurance ducking their responsibility to boost profits, into billing to insured patients. That is currently the largest factor driving costs upward.
Even if you have time to make choices, rare in most situations, of providers in a hospital you are likely to be billed directly by at least one or two that aren’t in your network for insurance. With many payment providers that use networks you can’t be sure every doctor or consultant is in your network so you will be stuck with their billing in addition to any other out of pocket expenses included with your plan choice. Very few doctors would be willing to allow you to choose every person or company associated with your care.
Your premiums also include costs for the growing administrative burden of having to meticulously complete multiple forms to apply for payment for services. Many hospitals now have individuals who are specifically qualified to bill an individual insurance company in their region. This is why the billing department in most hospitals went from occupying a room in the basement to now requiring an entire floor. When one adds in the cost of retained lawyers and collections necessary it becomes obvious that the primary motivation of insurance is not paying your bills that you pay premiums for.
If we were talking about “government-run” healthcare where the government employs the providers I would agree with much of what you are saying, but we aren’t. We are talking only about who pays the bills and how they make their money. I prefer to trust people who I can vote for at the top of the food chain over someone I will never meet and cannot influence and who has a profit motive to not pay bills that I will ultimately be responsible for.
This, I understand, will always be a difference between our world views, but there is solid evidence available that my view presents better outcomes for less money in every other modern society in the world, while your view is mostly just “big gubmint bad” that you apply broadly and relieves you from much analytical thinking. My major concern is not “how will we pay for it?”, but that we will even try.
From my perspective, which tends to be from the macro bigger picture, single-payer healthcare, even without increasing taxes or collecting premiums, will be a deflationary factor that will require additional injections of money or “middle-class” tax cuts to offset. This could be as large as a half-billion dollars, which would be an economy buster if our econ illiterate politicians take their usual course and refuse to apply economic reality to our monetary system, treating it as if they were balancing their kitchen table budget, which I even doubt many of them can do.
Our economy will eventually greatly benefit from relieving so many people of their unproductive work so they can be trained to become productive beyond finding ways not to pay for things. However, that presents a challenge that our current legislators have proven they aren’t up to, which is why they have allowed so much corporate influence into their decision making. If they would just get over their unnecessary quest to satisfy econ illiterate voters that everything they do is “paid for” they would improve their effectiveness greatly. The US dollar is a no-cost commodity to enable Congress to manage the general economy, not something that they must “get” prior to spending like a personal budget demands.
