Comment by nradov

Yes, provider organizations waste a lot of resources dealing with differences between health plans. Reducing the number of different payers would certainly reduce that overhead, at least in the short term. Mandating increased health plan transparency and use of open interoperability standards can also help by allowing providers to deal with those health plans in a more consistent way and automating much of the current manual work.

In general though I'm just skeptical that a single payer solution is the best possible long-term approach. US federal and state governments are already under tremendous fiscal pressure. So if we forcibly route all healthcare payments through governments then there's going to be constant pressure to hold down costs through blunt measures. And decisions will inevitably become even more politicized with special favors or punishments given out based on party loyalty. Do we really want to put someone like Xavier Becerra or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of centrally planning something like a fifth of the US economy?

The current US healthcare system is unnecessarily wasteful and cruel. But on the positive side we produce far more innovation per capita than any other country. Let's find a way to incrementally fix the worst problems without killing the golden goose.