link to original reddit post by /u/R_O
There is a tricky problem with the healthcare industry that few think about; there is a limitless demand of the most valuable commodity that exists within the economy, a person's health and life. How can you place a premium on someone's life? When a person is on the cutting table after a aneurysm or cardiac event, what would they be willing to pay? Usually that answer is anything. Realizing this fact alone is enough of a understanding to make the claim that publicly subsidized healthcare if an absurd notion.
The only thing that mitigates this limitless premium for health is competition. If hospital A advertises their cost of procedures and medical plans at a fixed rate, then hospital B must determine if it can match their capabilities, quality of service and reputation; if they can, they can determine their own rate of at a fair market value and raise it, undercut or match it as they see fit. The consumer then can make an informed decision as to where to bring their 'business', if you will. In our current economic environment this doesn't happen.
With medical insurance companies they set the rate at which the consumer is essentially extorted into paying, at the expense of every other person covered by that company. If 90 out of 100 covered individuals at company X have a existential medical need, company X will be footing the bill for these individuals 90% of the time, including the profits incurred by the remaining 10 individuals that are rarely utilizing their policies. One could claim that those people should then just drop their coverage; but since medical facilities have a baseline of revenue incurred by the subsidized insurance plans, an individual cannot possibly afford the out-of-pocket expenses that even basic medical procedures cost. If Company X is willing to pay $200k for a hip-replacement, well then I guess it's only fair if we charge individual consumer Y that much as well.
This was already a problem - now enter Obamacare and the Federally subsidized 'Healthcare Marketplace'. For a brief period of time people were forced into these plans (healthy and unhealthy alike) at threat of a tax penalty (which I paid one year, $700 wiping out my tax return). Now that all American citizens were under a umbrella of hand-picked insurance companies, they were all subject to the same premiums and otherwise healthy citizens were paying the vast majority of healthcare expenses of the the unhealthy. 25 year old Tommy who runs 2 miles a day, eats clean and has never had a major procedure is paying the same rate as 40 year old Johnny who eats a Big Mac for lunch every day and smokes two packs of Marlboro's. Yikes.
Although that policy is now gone, the damage has been done. All of the insurance companies that were not included in the Obamacare mandate were forced out of the market. Not to mention those that adapted and offered 'Short Term' policies (in effect a loophole) were also legislated against, and now can only offer 3 month revolving policies at a ludicrously low amount of coverage. Under-written policies were relegated to 'Employer Plans' were the employer must now foot the bill of their employees, although at this point it's more of an incentive just to get their employees to stay. They eat the cost. Most companies now just offer a Healthcare Marketplace plan and cover a part of the deductible in good will.
With these insurance practices, Federal interventions and baseline setting policies there is no competition in the medical industry. Hospitals will get paid, no matter what. And they can realistically charge whatever they want because the insurance companies have a nearly limitless pool of coerced customers. The only thing limiting them are healthy citizens not demanding their services.
Truly 'free' public healthcare is just taking it one step further. It eliminates the middle man and leaves no room for any incentives for people to be healthy. Imagine how many Americans right now are unhealthy while having to pay asinine amounts of money for their healthcare...now imagine that their healthcare was free. As it stands now those receiving publicly funded Medicaid are some of the most unhealthy American citizens that there are. The worst part is the vast majority of their medical conditions are entirely self-induced. The cost of free public healthcare would overrun any current Federal program, likely to include the defense budget.