As long as providers can continue to raise rates they will do so. Insurance companies will follow suit because who can afford to be without coverage?
At this point the only way to control costs is a "Medicaid for all" (as opposed to Medicare for all) that sets a budget of healthcare expenditures and forces the healthcare industry to control costs. The healthcare industry would be incentivized to keep us healthy because a healthy population is less expensive to maintain.
Today we have it bass-ackwards... the more care they provide, the wealthier they become. The healthcare system today is incentivized to keep you dependent upon it. That's not how it works in other western advanced countries and that's why they spend about 60% of the healthcare dollars as do we...and have healthier populations.
here's to nuttin... anyway
You are fine in most of your post until the final conclusion, which is why I say you've identified the problem but not the solution and why I don't accuse of being a complete idiot, just an ideologue without the humility to even entertain the possibility you might be wrong.
I am aware this is an excercise in futiltiy for you ideologues (differing opinions does not mean different ideology so you guys know), but it not lost on the thinking and fair minded who may pass by on the thread.
Less expense to your insurance costs also equates to less profit for the industry, less profit equates to less innovation which equates to lower quality of care. There's a reason why when you walk in to a hospital you look on the wall of names and they are 75% foreign, those are the best doctors in the world who emigrate from their
countries homes(even rich ones) to pursue greater success here (financial or otherwise, career advancement). There are reasons why we are the best of the best and why are the innovators.
So you identify the problem and propose the simplest solution, since it works in Europe it should work here the same way! No, that's not how it works, you have to look at all variables, all realities and then given that you come to a conclusion. It's way more probable that you fix our system by proverbially patching the leaks then it is you socialize it, in which case you would likely not only end up lowering the quality of care here, but it would reverberate world wide since their hospitals nor universities are as rich as ours (which means capable of throwing money at research). We can figure out other ways to increase incentive to health vs incentive to profit like something like those Christian shared health pools that popped up after ACA. I don't know, I don't have the solutions to the complex problem. I just say your simple solution clearly won't work, until you show me proof that it will.
You can't just say Europeans are healthier because of socialized medicine without taking in to account the obvious realites that Europeans are far less obese (no, googling around for statistics that says they aren't doesn't mean anything). At no point do you ever consider anything other than taking your meds to be taking care of your health, essentially. Europeans walk everywhere, they still live in villages where you walk down to the open air market to by local organic foods for their meal while you are sitting there at your McDonald's drive thru on Nicholasville Rd with your thumb up your overweight arse. If they live in cities, they walk because driving is very expensive and a nuisance. I don't know where I got the statistic, but it was probably NPR or some liberal source back when ACA was being proposed, but if things were to go at the projected rates the cost of treating diabetes alone would consume the entirety of the discretionary budget by 2030 or whatever which is obviously unsustainable and wouldn't work.
You are being enlightened here but it could only ever work for yourself if you remove the blockers and blinders you have on your mind. Until then, yes you won't ever have a clue, sorry. Go move to the European countries you admire so much and you will see how it actually works in reality there and why middle class Americans could never actually survive losing 60-70% of income to some form of tax (which is what happens in reality yes, no amount of googling you could do replaces the experience you would have if you moved there). Go there and do it if you want it so bad and then maybe, just maybe you would understand the infinite reasons why things are different there, some better some worse.