Anyway, I thought you wanted to discuss serious ideas, not magic unicorns.

Take care and stay warm. Until next time…

Single payer would lower healthcare costs, provide affordable universal coverage, and solve the medicare deficit problem. Taxes would go up, but they would be less than what people and businesses are currently paying for HCI, so the net would be positive for the private sector. Furthermore, a healthier populace is a more productive populace.

But it doesn’t change the cost structure. Your “pay as you go” would be the same as a tax increase to pay for the current gap. And if you tinker at the edges to get those cost controls, you get unintended consequences out the wazoo. (Of course, your program would completely keep the government out of all of those decisions. They’d just pay the bill, whatever the bill may be.)

“those who feel that government should be flushed down the drain shouldn’t be involved in governing.”

99% of the people who have, are and will govern do not believe that. There is a proper role for the federal government, starting with protecting people from enemies foreign (Al Qaeda) and domestic (Goldman Sachs, Monsanto). After that, it’s up for debate.

In regards to governing, some are better than others and some excel in some areas while being awful in other areas. However, those who feel that government should be flushed down the drain shouldn’t be involved in governing.

Actually it shows that people who think government is the solution are even worse at governing. (Not ruling, mind you. Governing.) All of the problems discussed here center around the failures and coming catastrophes of national collectivism.

If you really want “single payer”, try it out within the confines of federalism. If the people want it, they can enact it in their own states and suffer either consequences or successes of their electeds’ desires for such socio-economic engineering experiments.

There is nothing reasonable or realistic about going all-in, taking the whole nation further down the road to fiscal and economic perdition by expanding the national ruination already underway from such structurally-unsustainable national entitlement programs as those inflicted on us in Medicare and SS.

Contemporary leftists seem awestruck from all sense by the grandiosity of their collectivist ambitions. This ceaseless and shameless demand for ideologically self-indulgent expansion (and abuse) of public power, oblivious to real world consequence, belies an attitude towards the future crystallized by their worship, Lord Keynes, who said “In the long run, we’re all dead.”

“Regardless of your theories about central planning, the record shows consistently that people who think government is the problem aren’t very good at governing.”

Actually, the record shows that no one is good at governing. Including the people who created Medicare, none of whom would fit your description above.