Not everyone gets cancer, the medical insurance profit model is predicated on a bet that most people won't. The more people in the coverage pool, the less likely you will be paying out for every single person.

Socialized care is just the expansion of that model to encompass the entire country's citizen population. What would have been privately-captured profit from people that were healthy members of the pool can instead be used to reduce the premiums paid by all members of the pool.

Another example is eye surgery. Originally the procedure was expensive but now it is more affordable because it is not covered by insurance. Comparatively, plastic surgery is relatively affordable because it is not normally covered by insurance.

Reducing or eliminating health insurance would also eliminate a lot of the medical administrators that provide zero care but due incur a cost due to their salaries.

As far as getting rid of the profit motivation but capturing the profits and giving it to those without health insurance I believe that you would also eliminate any reason to innovate and create new drugs.

I will admit that if you got rid of health insurance tomorrow that there would be a lot of short term pain. But I also believe that in the long run people would be better off because they would be able to afford there healthcare.

Using a different example look at the cost of college. I believe that we could fix that problem one of two ways. The first way would be to get rid of government loans and grants. The other way would be to allow people to file bankrupcy for student loans. The first way would attack the problem by getting rid of easy money. Because easy money makes things expensive. The second way could work by shifting the risks of the loans from the student to the banks. The problem with this solution would probably make it harder to pay for degrees that don't pay well.

To summarize my arguments, cheap money makes things expensive and is destroying almost everything is this country.

Edit: added the college example.

- Compulsory basic insurance (private or public) (Switzerland)

- Private insurance + equalization pool (Netherlands)

- Compulsory HSA + government price fixing (Singapore)

- Socialized general coverage + private supplementary coverage (France)

I will admit that I have not read up on those countries healthcare plan but I think it is a lot more complicated than saying lets copy X countries plan. If you made a big change there would be a lot of second and third order effects that we would have to deal with and we may not like those out comes.

I could see California residents arguing why they should pay for the medical expenses of tourist.

We could point finger all day long about who is responsible but at the end of the day nothing changes. I think politics at this point is more about entertainment then anything.

I don't think anyone in the discussion thread is advocating carbon copying another country's healthcare.

I think that both we and everyone in this discussion can agree that what we are doing now is not working and is unsustainable. We are just arguing over the best way to fix it. I personally believe that easy (cheap) money makes things unaffordable where is seems everyone else wants to spend or devote more tax dollars to an already broken system. I would just like to fix the root problem and not the symptoms.

Are you suggesting that healthcare legislation should be drawn up in a vacuum? It's important to compare and contrast the benefits and pitfalls of other countries' systems. It's really all we have to go off of evidence-wise. It's also good to look at them for inspiration. There are a lot of different ways the public and private sector are being combined to make far more cost-effective healthcare systems than in the US. You are correct that some might not work in the US; that sort of reasoning needs to be weighed into whatever overhaul happens.

> I would just like to fix the root problem and not the symptoms

What are you suggesting as the root issue?

The main point to my arguments is that cheap money makes things expensive. Meaning is the government or somebody else subsides healthcare it will get more expensive. Because why not. Hospitals are trying to compete with other hospitals so they want the biggest budgets for paying the best doctors and newest equipment and technology. So why not charge just a little more then you need to get that. Then the next year comes around and the hospitals need more money so they charge just a little be more this year and it goes on and on.

You could probably start to fix things by making everyone publish their prices and charging the same price for cash as they would to insurance. From there things would start to unwind.

I would argue that rights are things that we declare by agreement as a group, not physical objects or measurable qualities. Of course healthcare is not currently a right; we haven't made it one. The question is: "Should healthcare be a right?"

Too much could be written about this argument but to me a right can't be provided by someone else's labor.

Now that I think about it, a right is also something that can't be taken away. No one should be able to prevent your free speech (1st Amendment), defend yourself (2nd Amendment), or violate your privacy (4th Amendment) without due process.

In this case no one is preventing someone from being able to care for themselves. We are just arguing over who pays for it. It is probably a bad example but everyone has the right to use the roads for transportation. We just don't have the right to the car, insurance, and gas.

Edit: Added more comments

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights

You're also touching on the difference between Natural and Legal Rights.

You can't have rights without guaranteeing action. My right not to be tortured requires all sorts of individual and societal interventions in order to fulfill. There's no classification of rights into positive/negative and certainly no difference in validity between the two.