So you're not paying the beurocracy hired to regulate the health care system? And, since they're government employees under Obama, who's gonna pay their union organizers?
Large companies have superfluous bureaucracy too, and all sorts of overheads that just aren't applicable to governments, and then you have the profit issue which makes up a significant percentage of the cost. So in terms of a simple equation, you have -
Government: Bureaucracy, some overheads, actual cost of healtchare
Companies: Bureaucracy, more overheads, need for profit, actual cost of healthcare.
Furthermore, when you are with healthcare company X, their costs are subdivided amongst their subscribers. In a public healthcare system, costs are subdivided amongst everyone else in the country. Obviously the costs are going to go up because you are covering everyone as opposed to just a few people, but you have to consider that the costs of insuring people don't necessarily scale linearly to how many people you are insuring, so it's cheaper for one entity to insure a larger number of people than it is for a large number of entities to insure a small number of people each.
I don't necessarily think that public healthcare is "better" than private healthcare. Over here, we have public healthcare, but lots of people (including my family) have private health insurance. This is because with private healthcare there is shorter waiting lists and a better selection of treatments. But the issue is A) the expensive nature of US healthcare that necessitates health insurance to get healthcare and B) the huge percentage of the American population that cannot afford health insurance and therefore cannot affort healthcare. For them, any sort of healthcare system is better than none.
In fact, in some ways it's good that people who can afford private healthcare will probably go for the private healthcare, because it means that the public healthcare's resources are dedicated to the people who really need it the most. Because the private companies now have to compete with free insurance, they will have to offer a more competitive service, and thus you can argue that those who pay for private healthcare will end up saving money and getting better service, even if they have to effectively pay the medical bills of the guy who sweeps the streets or works on a building site or whatever.
I don't know about you, but I think healthcare, education and security are the bare minimum of what a government should provide to its people.
As far as I'm concerned, the federal government should be as small and unobtrusive as possible. Stick to national defense and interstate commerce regulation. Fund yourself through tariffs. Stay away from my paycheck and leave everything else to the states and individuals.
Last I checked, more Americans are dying from health problems than national defense issues.
Again, when done at a national as opposed to state level, you cut down costs by having more people chip in. If we assume that that some sort of socialized healthcare is a good idea, then having a common system for all states cuts down on superfluous duplication of functionality which only serves to waste money on each state's red tape. It makes an awful lot of sense in terms of saving money and increasing efficiency.
I guess what I'm saying is that the debate is whether or not social healthcare is a good idea, not whether "big government" should be getting involved, because whether or not big government should get involved depends entirely on whether it's a good idea or not.
