Quote (Ashirgo @ Mar 20 2024 10:19am)
Some countries in Europe have a system of private healthcare providers and insurers; however at the same time in these countries they also mandate a "basic" comprehensive coverage package that every single insurer has to provide at a roughly same price to everyone without exception. In this basic package, you get covered for everything that's currently determined to be needed for actual "health", so currently obvious things like dentistry, plastic surgery and magic are excluded. The prices of all drugs and procedures are signed off by the industry in cooperation with the government to ensure that the prices are actually fair and not "profit oriented".
This is effectively the government doing the job of the "single payer" via helping to set the fair prices and practices, while avoiding the inefficiency of actually managing the money and the customers (this is done by the private insurers).
I think my worry is that the ship has sailed in the US in terms of cost. those countries like many countries that shifted to a single payer system in truth did so at the same time the prices began to sky rocket in the US and the overall system started to bloat. now it here is a situation where we'd have to iron out a system starting from massively overbloated, rather than stopping it from becoming so. its a lot harder to round up cattle than to bolster fences.
i also wonder what the landscape of providers and insurers looks like in those nations, in terms of scale (something like # of each per 1k population) in comparison to the US where we have a bevy of both. as well as wondering if those providers have differing price indexes across their provinces the same way we do across state lines in the US. im curious what if any role do state governments in the US play in your preferred plan.