Quote Originally Posted by Gelatinous Cube View Post
Well that's pretty damning, isn't it?
Short version of my take: Single-payer healthcare has its ups and downs, but it appears to be the cheapest method for covering the population.

A purely market-based system of healthcare may be cheaper, depending on which economic theories you choose to believe, but it has never been tried on a national scale in a developed country. (I would be a lot more confident in the Republicans who advocate a pure market system if they could point to a single real-world example. Empiricism FTW.)

Here in the USA we've managed to take the worst aspects of single-payer and fuse them to the worst aspects of a broken market system, yielding the most expensive healthcare on Earth. Yay us.

The only upside to our system is that if you have a great deal of wealth (in the form of gold-plated insurance or good old cash), some low-percentage diseases and conditions can be treated at a much higher level of competence than in any single-payer system. So if you've got some weird variant of lymphoma, and your pockets are functionally bottomless, you can buy better treatment here.

And that's about it.