The hell with the health insurers. Let the government insure everyone.
Careful... that might not necessarily work as well as you might think.
Canada has a 'single payer' system (i.e. all taxpayer funded, for certain aspects of our helth care). And for the most part, it sucks. The commonwealth fund did a ranking of 11 western health care systems, and Canada was second last. The only one that did worse was the U.S., and the U.S. even beat Canada in a couple of areas.
The best health care systems in the world tend to be the ones that mix public and private funding.
Also it's time to rein in the pharmaceutical companies and their exorbitant price gouging.
Again, one of these complex issues that a simple answer (i.e. "rein them in") might be counter productive.
Granted, you can probably find examples where drug prices were
probably raised unfairly (e.g. Shkreli raising the price of an HIV drug from $13.50 to $750). But, drug development is a risky business, with many failures, risks of lawsuits, and high development costs. Plus, you have generics, which means that drug manufacturers have a very limited time to recoup their development costs (which means high short-term prices).
If you try to restrict costs too much, you may end up removing the incentive to create new cures.
From:
http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/34/2/245.abstract
...returns (profits on drugs have fallen sharply since then, with those for the 2005–09 cohort being very slightly negative and, on average, failing to recoup research and development and other costs. If this level of diminished returns persists, we believe that the rewards for innovation will not be sufficient for pharmaceutical manufacturers to maintain the historical rates of investments needed to sustain biomedical innovation.
I want to stress that I'm not excusing the drug companies from
all their mistakes. They were rightly condemned for bribing certain doctors for example. Just that trying to control their profits may backfire. There are no easy answers.
