The most efficient, lowest cost health care system may result in millions of people without coverage. Just like it does for cars, to use your example. To get coverage for everybody would mean a less efficient system. Now we can argue whether an efficient free market system or an inefficient government coverage is "better." But I wasn't arguing with that part. That's a moral/values argument, not economics. I was arguing about how you knock the "free market" system because our private insurance system doesn't work. Of course it doesn't work. It is not free market. It's a mish-mash of different ideas in different states with nobody knowing what's really going on and the doctors having to hire legions of administrators to keep it all straight. Are you arguing that a more socialist health care system would be better than what we have now? If so, I wouldn't necessarily disagree. But I would argue that a true free market system (or a system than leans very heavily towards the free market, since the government will always have some say) would be better than what we have now and would be better than a more socialist system.
I live in the USA. I had to go to the hospital once with tonsilitis. First visit, they tell me they don't know what it is (even though I found out in 5 minutes on wikipedia), gave me painkillers & antibiotics and sent me home. Yeah, I received just great treatment there, so great that the thing got worse and I had to go back to the hospital the next day. I don't remember the bill for that first visit, but I'm sure it was outrageous. Second visit, I wait hours to get seen by a nurse, more hours to get seen by a doc, he spends two minutes draining my abscess then they send me home. The bill? $7000, not including the cost of meds. Thank God I have health insurance, but 50m people don't, and regardless those prices are insane. Costs in the US healthcare system are out of control and need to be wrung out by force, whether it's by breaking the AMA, breaking the malpractice lawyers, breaking Big Pharma, or (better yet) some combo of all three.
I hope the people who are currently insured in the USA realize that the coverage is going to be taken from them, put in a pool, and then "fairly redistributed" to everyone, thus watering down their coverage. Insert a huge fat wasteful govt bureaucracy and you have no chance of ending up with something better. NO chance. Put down whatever it is your are smoking. But as an insured person, I know im going to get hosed when the democrats pass nationalized deathcare. This country is teetering on the edge of roman style collapse, and this is going to shove it over the edge. We cant afford all the crap the govt is spending on now and were about to add the biggest govt money suck of all time. Fing brilliant!
Actually the current military budget is the biggest govt money suck of all time. How may days Iraq war payments would it take to cover a national health system? BTW, what ever happened to that THREE TRILLION DOLLARS the Pentagon lost?