Healthcare or Income?

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I don't disagree with you, but I think it's an optimization problem. All healthcare can't be free no matter what, but you can't tell me that healthcare in the US isn't overpriced. Do you really think the doctors are going to allow free market measures that bring costs down and lower their incomes? I agree that political pandering is the source of the problem but you won't get any libertarian reforms to help solve the problem either. So what are people supposed to do? Can't really blame them either.

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I don't think anyone serious in the USA has been claiming that health care will be free, the argument being made is that health insurance is an area where the free market has failed. Instead they call for having a single payer system like every other first world country.

It's not really that difficult to understand why this is the case either, the entire basis of insurance is that it's essentially a group savings system. The more people in an insurance pool, the easier it is to cover whatever it is the insurance is for. This runs entirely counter to market logic as a market works best when there are many competitors where insurance works best if there is a single insurer that everyone is a part of.

Here's an simplified example of why this is the case.

Lets say you have 1000 people, and the chance of any of them developing cancer is 1%. That means on average, 10 people in this group of 1000 will develop cancer. On top of that, lets assume that the cost to treat the cancer is always 50k and that insurance overhead is 0%, meaning 100% of funds paid into the plans is used to pay for treatment.

In this first example, there will be 10 insurance providers, each with 100 people. Person 1-100 will be under provider 1, 101-200 will be under provider 2, and so on.

We will roll a 1000 sided die 10 times to determine the 10 people who get cancer, re-rolling if we get a duplicate.

This gives us these numbers: 212, 767, 599, 968, 41, 971, 395, 814, 811, and 737

Now, if there was only one provider:

This alone shows that a bigger pool means costs are more stable, but this has yet to factor in overhead.

Having a single insurance provider will always incur less overhead as health care providers won't have to deal with a bunch of different insurance providers who all have different rules and coverage.

In the USA, this overhead, the splitting up of risk pools, and the profit cut insurance providers take has led to insurance costs being near double what they would otherwise need to be.

Insurance is important for a number of reasons, but the most important one to remember is that when the shit hits the fan and you're incapacitated, you can't pick what health care provider you're taken to. That means market forces don't work with health care providers either, and without a body of people behind an insurance provider, they could charge any price they wanted and you would be SOL with the debt.

Politicians suck, but the numbers clearly show that single payer insurance is better. Not to mention the fact that every major country that has moved to single payer insurance has never gone back. Single payer makes people's lives easier, there's no haggling with insurance companies, no worrying about missing a payment, et cetera.

Also, yes, increasing people's income would help a lot, but it alone does not solve all issues.

The USA could cut their military budget in half, erase most of everyone's debts, do single payer health care insurance, offer publicly funded college, do massive infrastructure rebuilding to replace the jobs lost by cutting military budget, offer public transportation throughout the entire country, lower taxes, and still have a military so huge nobody would dare touch them.