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single payer. next question.
Take away all the govt programs, figure out how much we pay for each person on those programs, and give it to them in straight cash instead. Let them optimize and be done with it.
Unfortunately a big problem with American government is how miserably inefficient it is. An ideal scenario would be a nationalised health service where every citizen is within a catchment area for a doctor and a hospital where they can receive care without having to pay directly or fart around with insurance, because those doctors and hospitals are funded by the government through taxes - the same way that cops and firefighters are. However, your government has so many splits and departments and stuff that would have to be fixed before you could consider centralising something as important as healthcare. Otherwise a large amount of the funding would be wasted in administration and bureaucracy. Assuming the system would accommodate it though, it will work out far cheaper per person if their tax dollars pay for doctors, equipment and medicines because a) the cost of equipment and medicines becomes wholesale rather than needing to fund the profits of private hospitals and b) there are fewer middlemen.
@Research Associate that is a terrible idea. Two things: 1) you need everyone to be in the risk pool to drive insurance costs down for everyone (hence the ACA penalty) and 2) having the government be the single payer gives them massive purchasing power to lower the cost of drugs. There is a reason drug companies hate Medicare, and its because they are great at negotiating.
MS1, argument 2 is fairly common, but I think it's flawed. It really boils down to how much you value new drug creation/research. Pharma companies play the venture model where they develop a lot of new drugs, and expect financial home runs on the few drugs that succeed and get approved. That's why drug prices in the US are so high, in part, because of the patents that protect them from competition. However, drug companies also understand how marginal cost pricing and segmented demand works. If it costs 10 cents to make a pill that I can sell for $20 in the US and $1 in India, I still make money by entering the India market. Even if you're a great negotiator and are able to get lower drug costs, it still throws a wrench in the ROI mode for drug companies, restricting future development.