IMO, if they were to implement a single payer system all at once, taxes wouldn't have to be raised. We could use all of the premiums that the insurance companies use for paying their over paid management and their shareholders. That would, IMO, enable tax rates to stay as they are.
Hmm. I think at last count there were 31 major health insurance companies in the USA and if each employed 200 people, you would look at something over 6000 people who would be going on the unemployment rolls and not paying taxes immediately.
Meanwhile, by most estimates, the current healthcare overhaul will create about 150 new bureaucracies. Given our track record so far, what do you suppose the cost of those bureaucracies would be over say 10 years? So add that to the cost of those unemployed insurance companies employees.
Then let's don't stop with premiums. Let's confiscate all the salaries of those insurance company execs. If that was $5 million each, that would net us about $155 million to offset an annual expenditure exceeding more than 2 trillion each year.
I don't suppose there is anything to be gained to factor in the cost of loss of benefits as everybody is stuffed into a one-size-fits-all system or the reduced medical care because many of our healthcare professionals simply won't want to do it anymore and will retire and far fewer healthcare professionals will want to work that hard for as little money as a single payer system would afford so they'll choose some other profession.
And we probably can't put a value on what it will cost us to lose our freedoms, choices, options, and opportunities.
Yeah, good idea there. The great experiment that was the USA isn't appreciated enough to fight for it any more. So let's just give it up and become just another European-like country with a stagnant economy, fewer choices and options, high unemployment, and little chance to improve on that.
But then I'm no math whiz.