In order to bring down the cost of health care, the government would have to operate the system more efficiently than the market does. I can't think of anything the government operates more efficiently than the market does.
I'm generally pro-private sector, but the stats on our health care insurance system are astounding. The OECD averages (which are primarily statist health care systems) about 8.9% of GDP spent on health care. The US averages 16%. US has fewer doctors per capita, lower physician visit frequency, lower life spans, and more uninsured.
I'll grant you that the private sector is more efficient than the government sector in the vast majority of cases. The health care insurance system is not one of them.
According to the WHO, the US has the most responsive health care system in the world. It also has the highest cure rate for many types of cancer. Much of the high cost of our system is due to an out-of-control tort system, which this bill maintains. Trial lawyers are major campaign contributors to the Dems, and they get to keep all their goodies. So those costs are still going to be around. Also, the government allows doctors to control the number of physicians coming thru the med schools. This allows doctors to control their own supply and thereby keep their prices high. Nothing in the bill's 2700+ pages addresses this either.
I would argue that government involvement in the private sector is why our system is broken. I don't mean for this to sound snarky, but what nation runs a better health care system than the US? The quality (for the cost) of medical care in the US is far better than any other nation.
Both Canada and Britain have gov't health programs. 25% of the people in Canada wait 6 months or more for surgery, in Britain that number is higher. In the US, only 5% wait that long. The waiting time for an MRI in Canada is 10 weeks.
The waiting time for a large chunk of Americans for all of those procedures is infinite, because they can't afford them at all. That makes the Canadian and British system look quite a lot better than ours. America has the best emergency care system for rich people in the world, but for the average Joe our healthcare system sucks compared to just about any of those socialized systems. The idea that America has the best healthcare system in the world is a joke.
And that's too bad. They only people that I've ever met that don't have insurance have enough money to pay for it, but choose not to. The poor are already covered by social programs.
> They only people that I've ever met that don't have insurance have enough money to pay for it
Then you haven't met enough people.
> The poor are already covered by social programs.
That's a joke I hope, but it isn't at all true. Social programs tend to only cover emergency care. If you get cancer and you're poor, you're fucked and doomed to a slow death because emergency rooms don't do chemotherapy. Anything that requires treatment but isn't immediately emergency life or death and you're screwed. Do you actually know many poor people?
But the government's not running the system, contrary to what you may have heard from the people that got the GOP talking points memo. The bill keeps the private-insurer system in place.
