[jzackpete]

It's silly that believing more government intervention will solve the problem, given that a big reason healthcare became tied to employment in the first place was wage freezes by the government, from which employer sponsored health insurance was exempt.

We're not going to solve it by constraining the supply of healthcare by regulating every aspect of it, and then subsidizing the demand.

[atonse]

It’s not constraining care. It’s a single payer system. Think of there being one insurance company.

This isn’t theoretical. Medicare already has been supporting the most frequent users of the system for decades. It’s a proven system with low overheads.

Yes there’s probably abuse but overall it has high satisfaction from its stakeholders.

[jzackpete]

I'm talking about the regulatory capture of everything related to health care: medications, credentialing, insurance, etc. Any regulation imposed on the production of a good or provision of a service is a constraint on the supply. Reducing supply increases costs. I fail to see how the imposition of one insurance company (a monopoly) would improve that.

When Medicare was created, medical care accounted for less than 7% of GDP. It's around 20% now[1]. If you extrapolate life expectancy from before Medicare to now, has that massive increase in spending changed the trajectory at all?

You see the same phenomenon in higher education: we subsidize demand through government-backed loans, and costs and administrative overhead skyrockets.

[1] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spe...