Fair enough. So let's just ban for-profit healthcare so we can stop being distracted by that whole thing.
There's a ton of bullshit that goes into "medical expenses" in the US. Not the least of which is the inability for people to pay for care and end up in the ER for urgent non-emergency services because ER services are required to be provided. Hospitals need to foot the costs of those people that literally can't pay. Those costs get amortized over every other service (plus plain old margin and gauging) increasing the overall costs.
Besides eliminating unpaid emergency service public health coverage would let people get regular medical care without plunging into debt so they'd go sooner before conditions become acute. Private insurance could even still exist, but as a premium add-on to statutory coverage.
More doctors and nurses is just supply side economics applied to healthcare. Those jobs will appear naturally with the entire population completely covered. Rural hospitals could even open back up since they'd be serving people with actual coverage.
“If the public health goal is to improve hospital care, then focusing on things like for-profit or nonprofit status is a distraction” [1].
> Taking "profit" from keeping people "not dead" seems as close to extortion
Modern medicine is expensive. For profit or not, expenses must be covered.
We’re better off incentivising people to become doctors and nurses and pharmaceutical researchers. The problem is all the nonsense being eaten up in administration, administration largely paid for by price obfuscation.
[1] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/hospitals-c...