Beyond that, the only advantage single-payer systems have is the lower prices that result from wielding monopsony power. I don't think it's possible to maintain the quality and pace of improvement of health care when people are funding it less than they would be willing to. Health care is expensive because we value it so much that we throw tons of money at it. People try to provide better care in order to get some of that money, and if you take some of the money away, there will be less people advancing the industry, which isn't what people want.
If the U.S. government stops incentivizing the connection between employment and insurance, starting a company wouldn't need to have any effect on your health care. No single-payer system required.
Also, you assume a slow in advancement in medicine. This can't be further from the truth. Small example: all of the patients registered in the UK (i.e. residents) are getting digital patient records.
Americans will be covered rain or shine once the healthcare reform bill kicks in. If you can afford it, you have to by insurance. If you can't, it will be subsidized so you can afford it. That's the goal, anyway.
Markets require choice to function properly. I think the American approach is less likely to result in unintended consequences.
The solution is requiring everyone to pay for insurance so that the pool of insured people is as large as possible. My personal preference is either a single payer, or multiple payers who are all registered non-profits and required to keep a very high Medical Loss Ratio. The individual mandate will do this to some degree in the US, but it may still be cheaper to just pay the fine than get insurance.
Say I buy an insurance policy to mitigate the risk of treating cancer, should I develop it. I would like a contract that said, "The average cost of treating this is $X and its incidence is %0.Y so if you pay us $X * %0.Y + Profit, we'll agree to pay to treat you if you ever develop it."
Or say I already have cancer and want help treating it. I'd like a policy that said, "It might cost you $10,000 or it might cost you $500,000 to treat this. But we'll offer you the average cost split into payments over several years, and we'll absorb shocks in the price for you."
It seems bizarre to me that health insurance is sold the way it is. It's as if I had auto insurance that paid for repair work to be done that month--whether or not the accident occurred while on that particular contract.
We spend more on health care in large part because we have way too much surgery going on. There's other stuff going on too, but there's a lot of waste to go with us 'valu[ing] it so much'.
If there's too much surgery going on, that can be fixed without a single-payer system. My point about the value we place on health care is that even if we fixed all the problems with health care in America, we'd end up paying more than countries with single-payer systems because those systems force the price down below what people would be willing to pay on their own. That is a bad thing.
This is very far from the truth. Worry not, rich people can spend to their hearts content in single payer countries. They still spend less and have better outcomes.
In the abstract maybe we do want to spend a lot of money for health care. However, medical costs have been growing at double digit rates. Hopefully that pattern does not continue for too much longer.
Medical costs are rising because people have more and more disposable income, and they're choosing to spend it on the things they value most, like health care and education. Instead of letting that price signal serve as motivation for more people to supply the goods and services that people value most, single-payer systems force prices down and result in less investment in the products that people want to purchase. Forcing people to buy a product from a single vendor hinders competition. Forcing prices down by hindering competition is bad for the future of any market. It's a bad idea.
The median real income has been hardly been growing at a fast rate. You'd need it to get growing at an incredible 10% a year for your explanation to be at all credible.
I didn't say incomes were rising. I said disposable incomes are rising. I can't find data to back that up, especially since the economic definition is different from the colloquial meaning of "disposable income." However, it's clear that technology has made both the necessities and luxuries of life far cheaper over time, which leaves more money for us to spend on other things even with a stagnant income.