But as a consumer of health care in the UK I'm struggling to see what the problem is - the NHS is cost effective and generally available and if you want a slightly nicer room and to jump the NHS waiting queues (which do happen) then you can go private and get any kind of treatment pretty much when you want it.
I'm not saying there is a problem with it, I'm just saying that the existence of a PH market in the UK is not a strong counter to the Republican concern about a government takeover of the market for health services.
Indeed, and that is perhaps one of the two coherent claims made by republicans against a decent public options (single payer or otherwise).
Coherent Claim 1: The existence of a public option harms the viability and structure of a private option
Coherent Claim 2: A healthy, careful individual should not be forced to subsidize an individual who does not take care of their own health - but is forced to by a public option.
Both claims are a matter of opinion; It is my opinion that it is no different than police, school or war. (1: The existence of police harms private security; the existence of public schools harms private schools; the existence of the US army harms private mercenaries. 2: I should not be forced to pay for protecting someone who does not make an effort to protect themselves; I shouldn't be forced to subsidize teaching to anyone; I shouldn't pay for a war I didn't ask for).
I'm not sure why health care, which is sometimes (literally) a matter of life and death, and about which one has much less control than anything else, would not get a public option when schools do. And I have yet to find a republican who was coherent about why, if public healthcare is a problem, should we not also abolish police departments and public schools. But I guess one might exist.
The bigger problem with the republican standpoint, is that the coherent arguments aren't even made all that often; instead they tend to spread FUD with arguments that are easy to refute if you just care to look at examples - see, e.g. : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4888507
Those two "coherent claims" are so broad that they capture most of the the individual specific arguments made against public health insurance; a conservative could reply that there are only a few "coherent claims" for public insurance too.
And, obviously, Republicans aren't big fans of public schools either. In fact, unlike private health care, which is out-executed by Medicare, public education is generally outperformed dollar-for-dollar by private education. (Note: I am strong, strong supporter of public education and oppose vouchers).
Your support of public monopoly education is interesting to me, as your comments on this thread make you sound like a thoughtful, well-informed person. Presumably there are some aspects of public monopoly education you would like to change. Do you support seniority-based pay scales, strong unions, and teacher tenure?
There's a few education economists that have noted that if we could fire the worst 7% of teachers in the US and replace them with merely average teachers, then the US would have the best schools in the world (Eric Hanushek out of Stanford is one). This is a vital and cheap policy for us to carry out, but it is well-known that you can't get fired from government jobs. I can't imaging school systems being the first to change.
Do you think it is politically possible to reform the worst parts of the public monopoly school systems with its current structure? School boards in population-dense areas are often staffed exclusively with union representatives. What model of the world convinces you that these school bureaucracies will do what is right for the students?
I find the arguments for student educational choice to be compelling. In a place like Washington DC, I think it will be much more effective to simply pay for the students to attend good schools than to reform schools that have been horrible (and overfunded!) for decades.
> two "coherent claims" are so broad that they capture most of the the individual specific arguments
That's not been my experience (I linked to a discussion from a month ago, but you can find the same points reiterated in this discussion by others). Those "other points" are not remotely covered by these two claims, and are touted far more often.
> a conservative could reply that there are only a few "coherent claims" for public insurance too.
That's true; perhaps it's just one claim - but it's a matter of fact, rather than opinion:
1. Every western country that implemented single payer spends significantly less for comparable or better results (normalized by just about every attribute you want)
(corollary) 2. Medical bankruptcies (that is, attributable directly to cost medical treatment, rather than, say, the inability to produce income due to sickness) are essentially nonexistent in any other part of the world, yet are the reason for more than 25% of US bankruptcies http://www.factcheck.org/2008/12/health-care-bill-bankruptci...
re: education - I'm with you on that. That's also something that the US can learn from other western countries - where generally, public education (at all levels, including preschool and academic levels) outperforms private education.
Sorry I was reacting (probably a bit emotionally) to the assertion by another poster that all doctors in the UK are government employees - which makes it all sound far too much like some kind of Soviet bloc nightmare.
