I never understood this because other countries have free healthcare and we don’t! We get sick and it’s expensive to even pay for anything!
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It’s incredibly inefficient.
In single payer models there’s a lot less overhead. When you have a single payer, or centralized administration you don’t have the redundancy that you get in a silo’d marketplace.
The counterpoint is often in a marketplace you should see more competition and innovation because a market advantage should make you more profitable – however this is rarely the case. In actuality, as the corporations generally just continue to inflate profits where they can.
Additionally there’s the issue in the US that it’s only the user who pays. So there’s a much greater emphasis on the individual user. That is to say your individual insurance policy is funded at an individual level. Whereas in a shared more socialized setting the community pool funds the care. That’s just an americanism, in other parts of the world the burden is shared equally amoung the entire pool so everyone pays a bit rather than one person paying a lot.
It’s important to note almost every country I’ve ever looked at is a little bit different. I’m no expert, but I’m fairly well read on the subject, and the Canadian system, compared to the UK system, to the Swedish are all different from each other, with varying approaches on administration or functionality.
Edit – to clarify, I know that in American systems of insurance there are still funded pools not all individual, it’s just that there’s many more, and they are private pools, rather than a universal all community pool. And there’s the issue of deductible etc which applies sometimes in universal systems (albeit more rarely).
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