Around the world, it appears that low costs lead to universal healthcare, not the other way around.
What America needs to do is make it cheaper and easier to become a medical practitioner without taking on half a million dollars in debt and wasting half of one's pre-retirement life. No fancy government program will work without first addressing that issue.
And Medicaid, Medicare, and the Veterans Administration (the three big government run healthcare systems here) all run more efficiently by every measure than any private health insurance system.
Note that I fully recognize the problems that the VA has had, but when you really look at it fairly, they have many parallels to problems in the commercial side of the system, we just don't tolerate that when it comes to government (nor should we).
After Canada implemented universal healthcare, costs rose rapidly before stabilizing: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/379054
Both private insurance and taxpayer-subsidized programs pay astronomically high prices for healthcare; I haven't seen any examples of Medicare paying European-level prices for services.
I know this feels true because laissez-faire and commie-bashing rhetoric is still common in the Western world, but there have been numerous studies recently showing that the US is the most costly per capita. The next 3 countries (by 2016 numbers) are all places where most things are more expensive because the country and its citizens are relatively rich: Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Norway.
There's even a Wikipedia article about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...
Of particular interest is this graph, which breaks it down by public vs private spending: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...
I feel like you didn't read and fully understand my comment.
Or are we more the token outlier with a "worst of all worlds" system?