If you take an industry cornered by an entrenched cartel and then socialize it as-is you are only cementing their control over it even further, making a healthy competitive market impossible. Prices are criminally exorbitant now, what makes you think they'll go down when the government is the one paying them? If history is anything to go by the effect will be the opposite
The UK NHS is able to use its monopsony powers to keep the pay for doctors and nurses extremely low. Doctors would need a 35% pay raise to bring it back to the 2008 level of pay. Many of them are looking to leave for Australia or Canada. Even US is considered but they would have do the residency over.
This is a ridiculous statement, the government can negotiate prices and has little profit incentive.
Some level of universal healthcare works fine in 32 of 33 developed or mostly developed countries. Stop saying "but it can never be done". It is significantly cheaper in other countries that are able to negotiate drug prices.
I hate this line of logic, it's basically just ignoring that almost every other developed country in the world has figured out and has done it without the need for "healthy competitive markets".
When did I say "it can never be done"? Certainly it can, but you'd have to make some pretty drastic changes to the US healthcare market as a whole first- and those changes will be staunchly opposed by all the entrenched healthcare cartels. It wouldn't be easy to do it right, and it'd be very easy to do it wrong and make the whole situation worse (which is what the healthcare cartel would push for). The US healthcare market is a uniquely fucked up monstrosity, comparing it to the universal healthcare system of a country the fraction of our size doesn't make sense.
You say the government has little profit incentive, sure, but they also have little incentive to control costs. It's "other people's money", they spend it like drunken sailors, even when they're 30 trillion in debt. Look at what happened to tuition costs after the government started handing out loans for them. I'd take these calls for universal healthcare more seriously if they talked about addressing the underlying issues in the market first, but from what I can tell it's mostly idealogues pushing their pet policy without grounding it in reality. All the bad actors in the industry aren't just going to disappear or start playing nice when they start getting funded by taxpayers (more than they already are).
