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Comment by 0n0n0m0uz | Hacker News Reader

Would you pay a few % more in taxes knowing that every human in this nation could receive the healthcare they need? I would without a second thought.

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With single payer you could possibly expect a tax-reduction for the same care.

You guys pay top 3 in the world in taxes towards healthcare, and just as much out of pocket, making it almost 2x as expensive for individuals than for example the nordic countries.

As a comparison 1 year max coverage for all visits and procedures after which you pay $0 is about $125 and another $125 for meds in the nordics. That's with the same $ amount of taxes per capita to healthcare.

Few more in taxes? Maybe we can redirect some funds pocketed by the military industrial complex instead. Though Boeing and others will fight to the death over their infinite money supply/bailouts.

Would not be nearly enough.

U.S. health care spending grew 3.9 percent in 2017, reaching $3.5 trillion or $10,739 per person.

That exceeds tax federal income tax revenue by about $2 trillion

The us govt already spends so much on healthcare.

The problem isn’t that we don’t have socialized healthcare. The problem is that for some reason, healthcare in this country is ridiculously expensive. We can’t have both; only one or the other. If healthcare is too expensive and you socialize it, the government will be bleeding even more money trying to pay for it all.

You do have socialised healthcare - it is called Medicare, Medicaid and VA. You are of course 100% correct that the problem is the cost of USA healthcare, followed closely by its complexity.

The answer is obvious: deregulate. Indian surgeons already perform more heart bypasses more often for a tenth the cost with better outcomes.

Down with the AMA. Probably the organization with the most blood on its hands in peacetime America.

It is a lack of regulation that got us into this mess. I don’t hate the free market, but the prices in the US are caused by the free market gouging as much as they can out of someone who has no bargaining power

It's not a free market when the alternative to buying id dying. It's more like putting a gun to someone's head and saying "give me $50k or I pull the trigger." That's not a free market transaction, it's a mugging. It doesn't magically become better if you get to choose which mugger you pay, or play them off each other to negotiate down in price. It's still a forced transaction.

It's just shifting money around. People are already paying that 3.5T. You're just changing the payer.

And that really doesn't matter because healthcare is so distorted it's tough to even argue that it's a free market at all.

Healthcare seems like the poster child for an inelastic market. The fact that so many people are still successfully being led to believe otherwise is a travesty.

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