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No. In my opinion, the goal of the health care system is to provide health care.

So I want a system that provides superior care. My goal is to have the best health care in the world. I live in a rich country, so we can afford to pay more for that privilege.

My second goal is to make health care competitive on both the care and cost fronts. No more price -fixing by large insurance conglmerates.

To do that, we need to go back to people being in charge of either paying for their own health care, or at least individually responsible for picking their health insurance, like they do for their homeowners, car, and life insurance.

That way, the insurance companies have to compete with each other by offering superior insurance at a cheap rate; right now they work on providing the best illusion of “insurance” at the cheapest rate to COMPANIES, who are looking to retain employees and keep costs low. It’s a triangle which obscures the market forces that would otherwise be in play.

A single-payer plan removes all incentives for some providers to do better than others; it prevents me from shopping around for the best provider regardless of cost; it keeps me from getting a level of insurance commensurate with the money I have to spend to get the best health care.

And since I like “easy”, I might well pay a good deal more for the privilege of getting better access, of not having to do a lot of paperwork, or not paying deductables. Or, I might decide to be frugal, and get a catastrophic care policy and then choose my health care providers for what is cheapest, and use the internet to figure out if I need better care.

Single-payer means my provider has no incentive of being better than the guy down the street, if it costs more. He’ll get the same money anyway. He’ll want to minimize face time so he can see more patients, and then he’ll win the business of the single-provider insurance by lowering the cost.

And of course, the single-provider will be government, who will make me pay more or less based on how rich I am, so I’ll be subsidizing worthless lazy people.