Health insurance costs 800$ a month so not having 500$ means you dont have insurance. Thats another level of poverty, for the which there is medicaid and a different set of programs and way to deal with those cases.

That's not true. First of all $800/month is what you'd expect to pay if you were young and healthy and with moderate deductibles. Good luck being older or sicker. The $500 that I'm referring to is $500 beyond what they budgeted for after their monthly expenditures. No, Medicaid doesn't always apply to these people, you should look into it. It also requires extreme levels of financial hardship. Medicaid takes a lien against your house to recover their costs. Not to mention the donut hole for whom having their house taken isn't even an option. It's brutal.

When I said most of America, I meant it. It's fifty seven percent of America. [1] Are you going to put them all on Medicaid and take their houses? I thought you were arguing for private cover :) This is the kind of thinking that pushes up costs. Creating barriers to seeking care early makes everything more expensive as the longer you wait, the more it costs to resolve.

Let's be rational about this. The US median individual income is $39,336. [2] Your take-home pay would be approximately $2614 per month after tax assuming you save nothing toward your retirement. Taking out $800 leaves you with $1814. The US median rent is $1500 per month [3]. This leaves you with $314 for food, gas, transportation, electric, water and sewer combined. And this is the best possible case: you're single. Then you want them to handle a $5000 deductible?!

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/most-americans-cant-afford-a-50...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...

[3] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/us-median-rent-hits...

It doesnt change the math to charge 5000U$S in advance through a payroll tax, than to have a 5000U$S deductible afterwards. The key metric is if the healthcare services are better utilized and are cheaper.

Sorry, would you require everyone get a raise in the amount of their health insurance benefits? Sounds like interventionist overreach into the free market to me. Remember how the 2017 tax windfall for companies would yield huge raises for everyone, but instead, only lead to stock repurchases? What makes you think this would be any different?

Since you also suggested in a different thread that it'd no longer be tax deductible, that $5000 would drop immediately to $3000 or less -- $250/mth. That's still dancing on a razor's edge.

Your key metric of "cheaper" and "more available" and "better utilized" is provably solved with a socialized model. There's no active private care model that outperforms one of the OECD socialized models, or else you'd have at least mentioned it by now. Instead, we keep revisiting unsubstantiated ideological libertarian talking points. I've got real world implementations to support my theories.