The prerequisite here, however, is that it's actually a competitive market. Two suppliers colluding or mirroring each other doesn't count.
If this were the government telling everyone to buy landscaping services or something else that's not intentionally supply constrained by the government to benefit incumbent you'd have an argument.
Extreme case is south africa, blackout 30% of time, and people are not allowed local solars (it makes goverment look bad).
> no matter how much effort the client site makes
I doubt solar provides stable predictable current 24/7 with warranty amd penalties. That is the hard part, and what it takes to be "high quality".
State sized grid is not a joke.
agree, state grid is no joke
People sometimes try to measure things like "overhead" but that also doesn't really work. If one entity pays $10M in claims but half of them are unknowingly fraudulent and another spends $1M to prevent the fraud, the first one is paying $10M with 0% overhead for fraud detection while the other is paying $5M with 20% overhead for fraud detection. Comparing the percentages implies the second one has "higher overhead" but it's also the one paying $6M instead of $10M.
And the same thing bleeds into the prices for specific services. A provider will happily give you a "20% discount" on the price if you don't bother to check that half their claims are fake. Then you're actually paying them 60% more while the books show them charging you 20% less per procedure.
On top of that, the market for many medical services in the US is extremely captured. The majority of states still have Certificate of Need laws, which are literally laws prohibiting new providers from entering the market if the local government (i.e. the incumbents) think the result would be "too much" competition. The AMA consistently lobbies to limit the number of medical residency slots and sustain a doctor shortage, and doctors who immigrate from other countries, even licensed physicians in countries with first rate healthcare and medical education systems, can't practice in the US without doing a US residency, which in turn consumes one of the residency slots and prevents immigration from alleviating the shortage whatsoever.
The premise is that competitive markets result in lower prices, not that uncompetitive markets do.
Anyway, I think parent comment to yours is using single-payer in the sense that implies universal healthcare [2].
[1] https://www.kff.org/medicare/how-medicare-pays-medicare-adva...
1) You get elected by convincing voters to vote for you. Which is not the same as actually getting the lowest prices.
2) Core competency has been stamped out of a lot of government agencies and so if you're a skill negotiator you want to be collecting the commission from the sales contract to the government as opposed to a low salary from being the government agent.
So at the end of the day, making all these contracts public wouldn't fix future ones from being issued. Although I'm still for more sunshine.
The first is that it doesn't actually get you out of the monopoly. If there is an uncompetitive market and you're required by law (or otherwise compelled) to purchase their services, making the buyer a monopsony still doesn't give them any leverage because they have to contract for the services even if the provider won't lower the price, and the provider knows that.
The second is that the purchasing bureaucracy then becomes a target for capture and has all the wrong incentives to resist it. They control a trillion dollars in purchasing power but it's really about a million providers getting an average of a million dollars each. That's the recipe for doing something inefficient a million times over because every provider wants to get $2M instead of $500k and will lobby for regulations or offer kickbacks or commit fraud to get it, and the public doesn't have the bandwidth to apprehend a million individual cases of things going crooked when each one is only 0.0001% of the total. And meanwhile "a million providers" still doesn't imply there is real competition to get you out of (1), because a radiology lab in Philadelphia isn't a substitute for a neurologist in Denver or vice versa.
The third is that you still don't have any sensible pricing mechanism. Even if you have a monopsony, how do they come up with a price to offer? Dart board? Demanding to look at the supplier's accounts, thereby giving the supplier an incentive to waste money because they're getting cost plus? The only real way to give them the incentive to do it for less if they can is to have alternate suppliers so that they each lose the contract if they don't offer the best price, but not having that was the original problem that "collective bargaining" was supposed to address.
Whereas if you instead focus on sustaining a competitive market then "collective bargaining" is just wasteful overhead, because the competition is already keeping margins thin so there is little more to extract from the supplier and you're only unnecessarily subjecting yourself to a layer of indirection and the principal-agent problem.