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Originally Posted by Radii
This is true but Medicare by its sheer size and influence forces many of those costs down if you want to work with medicare and accept medicare patients. I believe a lot of that naturally goes away in a single payer system.
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I'm not going to pretend I know enough to make a call one way or the other, but from what I have read, the problem isn't economics related, and won't be solved by market forces or changing tax subsidies or expanding Medicaid (which is just government payment into that same system). It's basically collusion amongst those three industries (the healthcare system, health insurers and Big Pharma) to keep costs intentionally high AND to hide actual costs from the public, so the public can't make reasoned choices on the best places to spend their healthcare budgets. The government could step in to change this, of course, but the above industries have well-funded lobbies and make sure the politicians are paid off to go after other issues and let this one roll on.