Replying to Russel Meyers:

Thank you for the links to your fine articles, which I have read (and clapped for). You make many good points, all of which deserve to be part of the debate.

We are united on one thing: Universal health care is best. What we disagree on is how best to implement universal health care — how to ensure that everyone gets the care they need without needless inflation of the costs to feed the appetite of special interests.

The point of my post (the one you are commenting on here, just one of many I have written on the health care issue) is that there is more than one way to achieve universal health care (or something that is at least much closer to it than what we have in the US). There is the national insurance approach as followed in Canada or Australia. There is the national health service in the UK. There is regulated and subsidized private insurance as in the Netherlands and Switzerland. All of these very different systems achieve high performance.

What we do not find anywhere is a system that looks like Sanders’ M4A. Sure, we could plunge in and try it without paying attention to the fact that no one else does it or without thinking about what are the reasons that no one else does it. But I think we should think first, then act.

Now that I have read your articles (which have a lot of good things to say) I invite you to read what I have written about an approach that would work best for the US. If you read it, you will find answers to your questions such as who decides what is “financially ruinous” and how to define a “fair share.” Please get back to me again with your comments after you have read this: https://niskanencenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Final_Universal-Catastrophic-Coverage.pdf