[waps]

Health care is famous for being one of the primary examples where the structure of the "market" makes competition impossible.

Firstly, when you need healthcare, there is likely to be little warning, and it's a "care NOW or death" situation. Corporations feel that's exactly the time to ask for a million bucks for the "service" and people naturally feel like not paying for it.

I side with people.

The counterargument is essentially malthusian[1] : if we do that, eventually the whole economy will be healthcare (because evolution means the cases of the sick will become more and more expensive until the system fails).

The huge problem with malthusian arguments is simple. Since their invention in 1798, not a single person has died due to a malthusian cause. No state has been devastated because of the effect described.

The malthusian argument itself, however, can be argued to have killed more than 100 million people in the 20th century, and was used as justification for dozens of massacres, genocides and wars. I doubt it was ever the "real reason", but ...

So malthusianism, which is the main reason we can't just decide to guarantee healthcare for everybody, is a theoretical argument that (so far) has proven entirely wrong. Everytime we moved in the direction of a malthusian catastrophy we compensated effectively without disaster. But the theory itself has been used as the justification for a number of catastrophies. It is the poster child for the idea of "the cure is worse than the disease".

And you hear people advocating it directly too : privatising healthcare is much more expensive than just curing everybody (to the extent modern medicine can do so).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism