Some arguments against universal health care I have heard in Spain: • Not enough choice, since you cannot e.g. pay more to get better treatment. • It's more expensive, since there's no free market to move prices down. • It's more efficient, since people are not paid to do nothing and impossible to fire (common complain about gvmt jobs here).
No beef here, just relaying what I've commonly heard
And the only place in health care where you can have a free market at all, is in elective treatments. Treatments that you can choose not to use when they are too expensive. For everything else, it's your health and possibly your life at stake; you can't really say no to treatment, so you pay whatever it takes, and that's a situation that's easily abused by profit-seeking companies.
Causation goes the other way. If your healthcare is cheap, you might as well socialize it, and it will mostly be OKish; if it's too expensive (as in the U.S.) you have no chance of running a satisfactory socialized system. Switzerland has largely private healthcare and mandatory ("universal") health insurance, but its costs are not too high despite it being a comparatively small country with inherently higher costs of providing such services.
> For everything else, it's your health and possibly your life at stake; you can't really say no to treatment, so you pay whatever it takes
This is not really true. There is such a thing as pointless overtreatment, and the right balance of benefits vs. costs can only be reached with increased price transparency on the part of providers.
I see no reason why it would work that way.
I mean, switching the US to a completely socialised system is certainly going to be a hell of a task, and even Medicare is way more expensive than it should be, but that's also because it's required by law to be expensive; Medicare is not allowed to negotiate lower prices, which throws away the primary advantage of a socialised system. But from what I understand, Medicare is still generally cheaper than privatised healthcare for the same treatment (though more expensive per patient because it insures only older people).
"Switzerland has largely private healthcare and mandatory ("universal") health insurance, but its costs are not too high despite it being a comparatively small country with inherently higher costs of providing such services."
The only graph I could find showed Swiss healthcare being even more expensive per capita than Dutch healthcare. This seems to confirm my suspicion that a privatised is generally more expensive.
The NHS in the UK had great results with publishing clinical outcome statistics making people shun places with bad practices. This lead to a decline in deaths and complications.
Well it's not like UBI is the exception here. This is normal in all forms of political discourse.