All the countries that have tried it are less in the red than the U.S. by any financial measure, and have longer life expectancies/lower infant mortality rates/better aggregate outcomes than the U.S., which is typically at the bottom of the scale for first world nations where medical outcomes are considered. And they spend less public dollars per capita than the U.S., which is an ironic twist.

The pure, brute facts show that taxpayer-funded universal health care is a vastly superior means of making healthcare accessible, effective and less expensive than any other setup, especially the American one. Your health care system is an insane joke that annually kills tens of thousands of Americans needlessly.

If it's such an affordable and great idea, why don't CA & NY implement it independently of the rest of the states and let their residents utilize the system?

Why does it have to be an every-state solution?

They could, and in fact the medicare block grants in Obamacare are for that purpose. States accepting the block grants expanded access to medicare, massively reducing the number of uninsured. It doesn't have to be an every-state solution, but like any insurance it benefits from economies of scale.

Why don't they? There's a lot of people in CA and NY who don't think it's more affordable and better, notwithstanding 20 or 30 countries who have done it successfully. The private insurance industry is, understandably, a huge lobby against it since it would likely reduce or eliminate their business (the mandate to buy insurance, under Obamacare, was pretty explicitly a payoff to the insurers to accept it because they would receive a huge influx of new customers), etc.

The US is the only major developed country that doesn't have universal healthcare and they are still deep "in the red".

And we spend more per capita in public funds than any country providing public universal healthcare and, IIRC, about middle of the road in public healthcare spending as a share of GDP for countries providing universal healthcare, and then slightly more in private spending on top of the public spending. The US is literally paying, in public funds, for full universal healthcare (or more!), and paying more in private funds on top.

Exactly. Everyone's 'in the red'. What are people getting for that debt, and who benefits? Elite will always be 'elite', but most other countries people don't have to worry about considering bankruptcy if someone gets an illness requiring hospitalization. For some bizarre reason, we've enshrined "health care" as a "benefit" which is only morally accessible by "employed" people who have "good employers".

At least the US is developing new drugs. About 99% of other countries produce none.

- 30% of drugs in the US are funded by taxpayer money [1]

- true, the US is producing about ~50% new drugs (sometimes more, sometimes less). Europe and Japan account for the most of the rest of the drugs [2]. The reason is simple: these are wealthy countries.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19264699

[2] http://www.hbmpartners.com/media/docs/industry-reports/Analy...

Citation?

Also, it's usual when comparing countries to restrict one's comparison to economic peers. If Lesotho or Vatican City aren't funding drug development, this doesn't say a lot about the relative merit of the U.S. system.

>So who should pay for it? All taxpayers instead?

Let's compare/contrast your own countrymen. The Department of Veterans Affairs (colloquially known as "the VA") is entirely funded by the US budget[0]. Guess where the US budget comes from.

The VA, among many other services, provides "free" healthcare to veterans who are 50% or more disabled[1]. Sure, it's not entirely universal healtcare but...

Then we look at the Children's Health Insurance Program (colloquially known as "CHIP"). Again, not entirely universal healthcare. However, the federal government matches states governments fundings[2] and the program is designed to reach the poorest (children) in the nation.

Then, of course, you have Medicaid[3].

Essentially, for the disadvantaged, there is some level of concern and you have an approximation (if not out-right full) universal healthcare for some of them; otherwise, enter the "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" mentality comes into play.

Apologies for the seemingly long diatribe of a soapbox but it seems hypocritical to say that taxpayers paying for healthcare is a bad thing when you - quite literally - do it for a sub-group of your populace.

>The only good solution, I think, is to work to make healthcare a lot cheaper in the long run.

As a comparator, surgery to remove a lipoma in the Emerald Isle costs about 800 quid[4] but this cost is about 1,725 quid[5] in the states.

So, there's an argument to made that Universal Healthcare can make the overall costs of healthcare far cheaper.

...and this is not to mention the gratuitous amount of money you'd be saving on the budget by condensing all of those government departments down into a much smaller government, yeah?

[0] - https://www.va.gov/budget/products.asp

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Ve...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children's_Health_Insurance_Pr...

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicaid

[4] - https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/health/health_services...

[5] - https://www.realself.com/lipoma-removal/cost

The US is deeply in the red and has per capita the highest health care expenditures by far. Universal care saves money.

We all pay for it now, just not necessarily through taxes.

We also pay for it now through taxes: uncollectible medical debt from those who can't afford to pay their medical expenses will be written off at tax time.