[ExI] Single Payer Healthcare

[Henry Rivera]

I'm not responding to any one message in this thread, but I found this
timely analysis which speaks to many of the things said here:
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-03-27/america-is-getting-richer-and-sicker

For example:
"Per capita gross domestic product is much higher in the U.S. than in
the other major developed economies, and no one really seems to be
catching up. Life expectancy, on the other hand, is lower in the U.S.
than in those same peer countries -- and the gap has been growing."
"I was inspired to make the GDP chart above by Harvard University
economist Martin Feldstein's recent paper, "Why Is Growth Better in
the United States than in Other Industrial Countries?" His main
answer: The welfare state has grown in the United States, but much
less than it has grown in Europe. And the intellectual climate in the
United States is much more supportive of capitalism."
"The pharmaceutical industry alone had 1,400 lobbyists in Washington
in 2014. American health care does a poor job of delivering health,
but is exquisitely designed as an inequality machine, commanding an
ever-larger share of G.D.P. and funneling resources to the top of the
income distribution."
"Suicides, drug overdoses and alcohol-related liver diseases have been
the biggest drivers of the mortality increase, and these problems have
been concentrated among those without college degrees."
"And countries with those big welfare states that Feldstein decries
seem to have done a better job of maintaining living standards than
the U.S. has. If he's right that welfare states slow growth, then the
U.S. has made a possibly reasonable tradeoff. If he's wrong (and there
are economists who argue that real-world welfare states have been a
"free lunch"), then we've just been shooting ourselves in the foot."

-Henry