If you’re pro NHS / single payer, you *must* support this. As well as banning drugs, sugar, extreme sports, unprotected sex, and other high risk behavior. Anything short of this just doesn’t make sense.
Not out of frugality. It’s a simple issue of fairness. 5% of the healthcare consumers will result in 95% of the costs. Why is it fair that the 5% that choose to engage in high risk behavior are subsidized at the expense of the 95% that choose not to?
https://theweek.com/health/britains-cocaine-habit-use-of-the...
If you pay for home insurance (you kind of have to unless you own your home outright or are renting), you're paying for other people's fire or water damage. And one day they might pay for yours.
If there's a lot of fires or water damage, everyone's costs go up.
Notice how in both of the above, there is no third party forcing me to pay for anybody’s bad choices.
You are paying for it with your rent, just like you're paying property taxes.
We wear helmets and seatbelts?
Insurance is entirely about paying a small amount so that the costs of being on the wrong side of bad luck doesn’t pauper your citizenry. A single payer system wildly reduces the amount that has to be paid, while increasing service outcomes since now you can negotiate with drug companies.
I would happily pay for that kind of system as well, because I am happy to ensure that the rest of the nation is better off.
The maximally effective version, with the least cost, and greatest coverage is one that distributes costs across the largest pool of individuals. Which is a single payer system.
> The maximally effective version, with the least cost, and greatest coverage
It would be even more effective to just enslave a bunch of people and force them to pay for my healthcare, but I don’t advocate for that because it’s immoral and unfair.
I can both support healthcare that’s free at the point of access (this distinction is important, because the NHS is not strictly speaking a “single payer” system, as both National Insurance and tax revenues from e.g. alcohol and cigarette sales are used to fund it) and individual liberty, even if that increases the cost of healthcare delivery. The NHS is not evidence of an authoritarian regime, it is evidence of the state playing a role in maintaining baseline standards of health, largely for the purposes of maintaining a healthy workforce.
Americans have such a wildly warped worldview in my experience.
I thought cancer care tended to be pretty expensive. Not sure that your math is so clear cut.
Though judging by the amount milords in the article I suspect that is far ways off.