@aadam101:
But how do you make it affordable if you expect people to only buy it when they need it? We already had that in this country. We had high risk pools in all 50 states. They were extremely unpopular and extremely expensive.
Once again you are making the case for socialized medicine. If you want to know if it will work just look at Medicare. Your father has the choice between traditional Medicare that is run by the government (pat A and B) or he can choose a private Medicare Advantage (part C) plan. Over 85% of seniors have chosen the government option. They don't want the bureaucracy of insurance companies. They choose the government option because it is simple. I'm going to guess your father is in the 85%.
We should have a system like this for all Americans where they can choose between a government option and a private one. I actually think there is a lot of value in Medicare Advantage plans for some people. It's nice to have choice.
Same way you make other insurance affordable.. such as home, life, and auto.
The main thing you keep ignoring is that the healthcare itself costs at least 10 times as much as it should. Of course the insurance is going to cost a fortune when the insurance company is paying out $25,000 per day just to share a tiny room in a hospital ($50,000 per day per room). An hour long procedure costs $28,000? OMG! Running a 1 liter bag of a saline and anesthetic solution for 1 hour is $5000? Shift that decimal point to the left, and THEN insurance costs will plummet.
My current computer has 16,000,000,000 bytes of RAM, a 500 billion byte Solid State Drive.. a 2000 billion (2 TB) mechanical SATA hard drive, an i7 7th gen quad core 2.7 ghz cpu… a 4k ultra high resolution NVIDIA Geoforce 950m video, 15.6" touchscreen, ultra audio including an external woofer, HDMI output, Bluetooth, ultra high speed wifi, USB C thunderbolt which is so fast that you can't even find accessories that can fully utilize it (50 times faster than USB 3.0) If that was a product being sold to the government, it would easily cost MILLIONS! That one liter bag of 99% salt water cost $5000. One hour of labor for that doctor to perform the procedure $28,000. So.. how much did my computer cost.. including shipping? Perhaps a billion dollars? No.. $850!