What sort of universal healthcare coverage is your preferred system?
If I may jump in.
First, I think that a huge portion of healthcare costs are driven by the salaries of middle management and C-Suite employees. While there's no single source for this, AI estimates that the top 10 companies whose
net revenues are about $2 trillion combined, spend about $1-$6 billion in salaries for C-Suite alone. This is about 120-170 people total! Then middle management whose salaries almost certainly dwarf that of the C-Suite and the number of people this represents is easily in the 1000's. Middle management can be loosely broken into corporate and operations employees.
If the 10 largest companies were to, hypothetically merge, they would purge 80-90% of the C-Suite people and as far as middle management, the cooperate side would become largely redundant. Operations would be fewer layoffs, but a sizeable portion would still be redundant. It's not hard to imagine that after a reorg, that at least 25%-50% of those employees becoming redundant. Not to mention that CEOs that operate no-for-profit hospitals tend to make salaries measured in 100's of thousands, not ten's of millions.
And, if the argument is that paying the private sector more results in better care, that's proven false by the outcomes. And before anyone blames government, it's the systems themselves that have lobbied for the system as it is. The private sector has no inherent desire to provide better care, they provide only the care required to maximize profit.
And that's just the top 10 systems and stand alone organizations.
This could save billions, maybe 10's of billions of dollars in overhead alone. And, unlike many other cost cutting measures, the savings would be realized every single year, year in and year out resulting in $1 trillion dollars in savings in as little as 5-years.
This is what would happen if the government operated the healthcare system as a not-for-profit industry.
Now, take all that savings and dole it out to every American on government healthcare, with a twist.
Every person has, let's say $10,000 set up in an account they can use to cover their healthcare expenses. The twist is that any money left over they get to keep (though each person would be required to get regular physicals and preventative care, we don't want to encourage people get sicker for money).
Now, watch what happens when people feel like they are spending their money.
Now, create a
real competitive free market healthcare system. If private companies can offer services for less, they can and should do so. Need an x-ray? No more getting told where to go for your x-ray based on pre-negotiated contracts between healthcare companies, it's your money and you want to spend as little of it as possible. So you can search online and find a provider with a sale on x-rays! The private sector will innovate in a real free market.
So while the government can institute a real government run healthcare system, the free-market can, in turn institute a real "free-market" healthcare system.
What about the people that need more than $10,000 in healthcare? The government would provide it like virtually every other western democracy, but the money saved by those who don't need more than $10k in healthcare combined with a more competitive market will save money while providing better outcomes will free up more money for those with significant healthcare needs. Better outcomes will save billions of dollars in the private sector due to lost productivity because of illness. Better preventative care, especially for those in the bottom 50% will result in better health outcomes and less uncovered catastrophic care do to a lack of healthcare until heart attacks, strokes, cancers and and endless list of ailments that are the result of a long term lack of care do to financial constraints. Having worked in a not-for-profit healthcare system, the cost of people using emergency rooms and not paying healthcare bills is, at the hospital I worked at, 1/3 of their total gross revenue.
