Leave the government out of it! Any government designed and run, or merely legislated requirements, system MUST be tinkered with for this constituency and that and there is always the pressure for “fairness.” Prices will go continually up and access will continually decline. A purely market system must bring the prices down for everybody. Insurance will return to its place as insurance instead of what it had grown into a prepaid continuing health plan that supported hordes of bureaucrats and the Insurance industry on the medical dollar which necessarily had to thus boost prices. The current iteration of “insurance” treats all cases as catastrophic coverage because routine care which it suposedly “covers” cannot be accessed before the user has impoverished himself with deductibles that price a large segment of the middle class out of the market for medical care altogether. Actual catastrophic coverage insurance should only cost a few hundred dollars a year and is all the insurance people would need in a market syste. The goal is NOT for everyone to be “covered.” It is for the maximum number of people to be able to access medical care on their own dime. Those who don’t have that dime will be cared for the way things were done before the current government monstrosity i.e. charity. Charity arises to fill such needs and fades when it is pushed out of the market by faux government competition. In a mandatory insurance regime the poor still cannot get adequate medical services because doctors don’t want to deal with money losing work and ER medicine is much lower quality than would otherwise be the case.
“charity”
That worked until about 1910.
“insurance”
By 1930, teachers, who still had jobs, ran up large unpaid bills at Baylor Hospital.
A hospital administrator, a former school administrator, saw the names of teachers on the unpaid bills list.
He created what became the Blue Cross insurance system.
Modern medical care in 2017 costs a lot more than the simple medicine of 1930.