It's a low-quality comment but no worse than every other comment in this thread that similarly indicates zero understanding of how insurance actually works.
Your claims are paid with the money collected from your, and other members', premiums. Everyone wants insurance that covers every single claim with few questions or limits, but that insurance company would quickly have to make the choice between dramatically increasing premiums or going out of business.
Every time a government entity mandates that insurance plans cover additional services, the cost of care goes up and subsequently so do premiums. When premiums go up, people / businesses shart shopping around and leave the pool, meaning the risk is spread out among even fewer (likely sicker) people and the premiums go up even more.
The alternative is just having everyone in one giant "single payer" pool so risk is minimized, with participation mandatory. Then, that entity (government probably) would just pay all the claims because in theory there would be less incentive to watch the bottom line. In reality, we've already tried this: Medicare is the largest single-payer health insurance system in the world, plus we have 50 Medicaid single-payer systems at the state level and additional single-payer systems at the federal level (Tri-Care and VA benefits). All of these systems face the same fiscal challenges and have been implementing every cost control measure they can think of for the past 2 decades. Medicare has been trying to move from Fee For Service (FFS) to outcome-based reimbursement for a long time now.
Those of us who know, know: the problem is COST in the system. Healthcare is EXPENSIVE.
I don't think that government-run health insurance (i.e. Medicare, Medicaids, Tricare) == "single-payer" healthcare system, especially in terms of the effects described by the parent comment.
My perspective is being under Tricare. You can imagine it like a closed system in which Tricare beneficiaries just go to Military Treatment Facilities (Defense Health Agency and service-run hospitals and clinics) for everything, and everything done in those facilities is covered with no questions asked and no bills or money changing hands. But that isn't how it works in practice. A large amount of stuff, like most specialty care, gets referred to places "out in town" (at local, for-profit, civilian providers). Most ER and urgent care visits happen out in town. At times, my wife and kids have been on Tricare Select which works like a PPO and involves all the usual discussions about who does or doesn't take Tricare, in-network or out-of-network, whether something needs pre-authorization or not, why a claim has been denied and how to appeal it, whether we've reached our annual deductible or catastrophic cap, etc.
So under Tricare, I think I feel more protected from profit-driven shenanigans and expensive mistakes than most Americans, but there's still a "cognitive workload, stress and uncertainty." I think a true single-payer system means that you don't have this (because it works like the closed system described above).
My sense is that Americans are equal parts traumatized by our healthcare system(s) and under-educated about how it works in other countries. We hear about how the rest of the developed world has had socialized medicine for 80 years and just assume that means you can go to any doctor, for any reason, anywhere, and get unlimited care with no cost sharing.
In reality it doesn't work like that anywhere. As you described well, certainly Tricare doesn't work like that, and neither does VA, Medicaid, Medicare, the NY Essential Plan, the UK NHS, or the Canadian provincial health systems. Every system has cost controls in place and almost all are facing fiscal pressures to implement more. Care is rationed with deductibles, coinsurance, waiting lists, limits on covered services, hybrid public-private managed care plans that implement closed networks, and so on. Not to mention the fact that when other countries' governments artificially limit what can be charged for certain drugs, equipment, and services, they're often doing so under a de-facto subsidy by the US government and the US healthcare industry. This is because so many of these innovations are made by US companies; the cost of care is meant to recoup the development expense. The less these companies can earn worldwide to recoup expenses, the more that cost is passed on to US rate-payers and to the US government (read: US taxpayers) in the form of grants and other transfers of money from government.
Your claims are paid with the money collected from your, and other members', premiums. Everyone wants insurance that covers every single claim with few questions or limits, but that insurance company would quickly have to make the choice between dramatically increasing premiums or going out of business.
Every time a government entity mandates that insurance plans cover additional services, the cost of care goes up and subsequently so do premiums. When premiums go up, people / businesses shart shopping around and leave the pool, meaning the risk is spread out among even fewer (likely sicker) people and the premiums go up even more.
The alternative is just having everyone in one giant "single payer" pool so risk is minimized, with participation mandatory. Then, that entity (government probably) would just pay all the claims because in theory there would be less incentive to watch the bottom line. In reality, we've already tried this: Medicare is the largest single-payer health insurance system in the world, plus we have 50 Medicaid single-payer systems at the state level and additional single-payer systems at the federal level (Tri-Care and VA benefits). All of these systems face the same fiscal challenges and have been implementing every cost control measure they can think of for the past 2 decades. Medicare has been trying to move from Fee For Service (FFS) to outcome-based reimbursement for a long time now.
Those of us who know, know: the problem is COST in the system. Healthcare is EXPENSIVE.