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The reason the UK doesn't spend more on healthcare is because they can't and their government has real limits on the total amount of money they can spend. America doesn't have these limits and it's why American government doesn't handle the cost-disease in anything else, including the already existing medicare and medicaid single-payer systems. Military equipment in the US is single-payer and yet the military industrial complex is completely clownish in blowing obscene amounts of money on small numbers of out-of-date or otherwise poorly performing equipment. The US doesn't even bother seriously stopping vast, industrial scale fraud in these systems.
But somehow, universalizing single-payer to everyone is going to force lower salaries and other cost-cutting measures, much of which could be done right now under current law given just the basic buying power of the federal government by conditioning funds. All of these hypotheticals in the above post about what a single-payer system could do could essentially be done now, but not only are they not done but we're not even doing the first step of any number of things to lower costs or reduce salaries or anything else right now. It is just not believable that US government would magically make these hard-decisions which would have real costs to powerful, concentrated interest groups, under single-payer when they don't do anything like this right now.
The only inherent thing to a single payer system is it centralizes control for better or worse (and after the covid hysteria, this should be pretty terrifying to people) and theoretically this would make it easier for someone to engage in a shock-and-awe approach to jolt the system back to something reasonable.
The best argument for single-payer, given all the other government interventions in healthcare which have made it far worse for vast bulk of productive people, is that it would significantly reduce the required individual effort to not just be completely fleeced by healthcare and at least remove that burden from a large number of people which would no doubt make their lives better in at least that respect.
The downsides will be numerous: healthcare quality will just get worse, innovation will just get worse, amount of healthcare delivered will just get worse.
IMO, the bulk of the benefit and lower downsides would be solved with universal catastrophic health insurance above which the gov foots the entire bill.
I am very skeptical of this claim and it just looks like a "find the lie" statistical factoid which are rampant and regularly posted in political discourse. It started with "actually, they have better outcomes!" and then it became, "okay they have the same outcomes," and then it became, "okay they have worse outcomes in some things, but it's marginal."
If I had to guess what the lie is in this regularly presented "fact," I would bet if you controlled for different demographics, different baseline population differences, different baseline health metrics, healthy user bias generally, we would find good evidence the US delivers much better outcomes pretty much across the spectrum. When I've poked at this "fact," it becomes clear the data just doesn't exist currently to meaningfully control for these things outside very broad population adjustments and other proxies and they immediately make the US system look better.
This is a lazy musing though and I don't expect you or anyone to really defend this.
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