Here in the UK we pay literally half as much per person for healthcare for similar outcomes, and everyone gets covered with no cost at the point of use, no medical bankruptcy.

No one is talking about a free lunch, they are talking about a better, more efficient way of doing it.

Not sure if UK is having same level of medical break through as US.

Most medical research in the US is, at a minimum, government-subsidized already.

So the budget is going into research instead of something like NHS.

No; the budget is going into insurance companies' budgets and pharma benefits budgets. There's a trillion-dollar industry that exists in the US solely to take money from people needing healthcare. That's where the money is going - look to the thing that doesn't exist elsewhere.

No, but some things are more efficient than other things. We aren't expecting health care to not cost anything.... we already spend more money than anywhere else on health care, and we get less!

We are saying "it is much more efficient and fair to have single payer health care"... it is not a free lunch... it is a cheaper, healthier lunch.

The rest of the developed world has single payer healthcare with results that are generally comparable to those in the US.

This is not true, and keeps getting brought up as if it were.

The rest of the developed world has _universal_ healthcare. In many countries it is provided through single-payer, in some it is through mandatory private insurance, in others it is a mix.

Where the United States stands alone is not the lack of a universal government program, but that we have many millions of people not covered by any health insurance system at all.

Fair enough, I don't necessarily see a problem with a non-single payer universal health insurance system as long as it is affordable for people.

An inefficient system will waste more money. You know that.