Comment by s1artibartfast

> There is a big difference between supplemental insurance and alternative options, and I think you are conflating the two. the first big difference is being able to opt out of the cost of public insurance if you go with something else.

I don't think that's a big difference. You can't opt out of paying tax for health insurance subsidies under the plan you're proposing--the difference here is that the amount of tax you can't opt out of under single-payer is less, because you're not forced to pay the corporate middle-men.

Yes, I'm saying the combined cost of paying your own healthcare AND poor people's healthcare under single payer is lower than the cost of paying just the poor people's healthcare under corporate health insurance, because it is. The government already pays more than half of health insurance costs[1]--the total cost would go down under single payer by every estimate I've found.

In short, it's literally cheaper to pay taxes for single payer AND a private health insurance premium, than to pay taxes for subsidies to private health insurance in addition to your private health insurance premium. The inefficiency introduced by ubiquitous private health insurance is that bad.

> I think that any puclic healthcare should carry the true price tag, and any subsidies for the poor should be subsidized as a separate benefit.

Ah yes, the "we should make poor people apply for healthcare, so that we can deny people coverage and so people who can't fill out paperwork can't receive coverage" solution to lowering costs.

I'm sure there's no way that right wingers will underfund these programs for the poor and then use their failure to function as an excuse to get rid of them.

> Essentially, I am strongly opposed to funding the public healthcare with an income/payroll tax because I dont thinnk there is much incentive to actually tackle prices.

I'm glad you brought up incentives! Here's how single-payer provides better incentives than what you're proposing:

1. Politicians are motivated to tackle the price of healthcare because this allows them to lower taxes for their constituents, which keeps them office. Money isn't the only incentive that exists. How do you justify ignoring this?

2. The perverse incentive to increase the price of healthcare to line the pockets of insurance is removed, because most of the healthcare isn't provided by private insurance companies that can lobby. How does your solution address this problem?

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4880216/