Ok, that's our miscommunication. I'd say that government ownership is certainly government involvement but it's not at all the same as government regulation. Even when the government has an agency running all the hospitals you can still have a more or less regulated healthcare system depending on how many rules parliament has passed about where you can build hospitals, how you can hire or fire doctors, etc. In the US hospitals are private but possibly because of that we have a ton of rules about who can become a doctor, how medicines are made, how close you can build one hospital to another, etc that are in excess of what you see in other countries.
Also, while most countries have healthcare that is payed for by the government having the government run healthcare is also fairly uncommon. I know Canada, the UK, and Singapore have public provision but most countries have public payment and private provision.
Thats not how you measure the effect of regulatory burden on price. If the us government turned into single-payer, the doctors are still private, but the government is the insurance.
Almost all doctors in the UK work for the NHS. Most countries with single payer also negotiate drug prices and reimbursement rates. So how would you have the government setting prices and reimbursement rates and not have a higher "regulatory burden"?
> Most countries with single payer also negotiate drug prices and reimbursement rates
The government itself barred Medicare from negotiating drug prices. If it is incapable of overturning such a policy, why should it be entrusted with 10x more patients?
> So how would you have the government setting prices and reimbursement rates and not have a higher "regulatory burden"?
You could have the government give a health-stipend for insurance for all americans, so its government funded, kind of like school vouchers. Today medicare instituted fee-for-service, which means you have to document every procedure you do and you get reimbursed based on that, which I believe is the core reason why there is so much red-tape in Healthcare.
This would allow all patients to choose which insurance fits best, and unleash major competitive forces on price.
> The government itself barred Medicare from negotiating drug prices. If it is incapable of overturning such a policy, why should it be entrusted with 10x more patients?
The political faction which opposed and supports the policy you point to does so for precisely the same reason it is opposed to the faction proposing single payer; people voting for the faction that supports single payer would also vote out the faction supporting that policy. So, you are literally conflating two opposing things as the same thing.
> You could have the government give a health-stipend for insurance for all americans, so its government funded, kind of like school vouchers
Yes, and if you also have the government provide a default fully-public-funded option just like with school vouchers, you will have almost exactly recreated what Medicare already does for it's covered population (Medicare Parts A & B are the public option, Medicare Advantage plans are the private options to which public “voucher” subsidies can be applied in place of the default public option.)
> The political faction which opposed and supports the policy you point to does so for precisely the same reason it is opposed to the faction proposing single payer; people voting for the faction that supports single payer would also vote out the faction supporting that policy. So, you are literally conflating two opposing things as the same thing.
I disagree, but regardless of that appreciation the problem exists today when its smaller, if you had single-payer it will be a harder problem to fix.
> Yes, and if you also have the government provide a default fully-public-funded option just like with school vouchers, you will have almost exactly recreated what Medicare already does for it's covered population
It was an example to show how high government participation can lead to low regulatory burden, not an actual intended recipe for the US and its current or proposed system.
That's an excellent example of how even government provision of healthcare can be more or less regulated. The law doesn't allow the agency running Medicare to not buy certain drugs which is the other side of the coin in terms of them not negotiating. By contrast the NIH is legally allowed not to buy a drug and uses that fact to negotiate lower prices.
