read folks advocating for universal healthcare. That is, in effect, a transfer payment: from the pockets of those with money to the pockets of those without money.
That’s one way to look at it, but I view it as a government granted monopoly not-for-profit insurance service. Similar to Social Security or Medicare. You could even grant it to a private company and give them a 3% profit margin or so. Of course, Social Security and Medicare are broken and doomed, but that is only because the public trust has been violated by congress in both cases. Since the taxes for those services are placed in the general fund, the money can be (and is!) spent on anything from bombs to homeland security contracts. And of course there was the huge Medicare drug benefit giveaway to big pharma.
I guess the problem is much larger than healthcare, now that I think about it. Even if you created this service in the US, the congress would raid the fund to buy more bombs and Coast Guard cutters that don’t float and bridges to nowhere in Alaska. The service would then become “in trouble” and it would be argued that government can’t provide it effectively so it must be privatized. We’d be back to square one.
