I would like to start a thread about Health Care and how much cheaper Single Payer can and will be-

and how overstating the costs might lead people to not understand HOW and WHY its so much better.

The most important difference is its simplicity and inclusiveness, everybody is born with health insurance, and there are no check points along the way where somebody says "STOP" does this person have good enough health insurance!- as there are now- That saves a great deal of money, because as many of us know, oftentimes people need health care but do not get it because of costs. A situation which gets worse and worse with time with our current system. Another key point that saves a great deal of money is the "stitch in time saves nine" principle. People literally can go to the doctor when they have a symptom early on and if people do that and the doctor does whatever is indicated, they then know if something is worrisome and should be investigated further, and do so, and if not they don't need to, good. Another thing that single payer prevents is the muzzling of doctors that is occurring now, with poor patients because their insurance wont cover a lot of kinds of care. So wealthy patients now get a very different kind of health care than poor ones. That will stop. These are all huge changes and they will be paid for by improvements in the effectiveness of each health care dolar and an improvement in the amount of our money that goes to care, a lot of accounting and staff hours will be able to be greatly reduced. In terms of numbers, the health insurance companies do not employ a lot of people relative to the US population, its less than half of one percent. Even they will likely to be able to shift to other kinds of insurance without much difficulty, wit the added advantage that they no longer themselves would need to go shopping for health insurance.

An interesting factoid- the government already spends around 2/3 of every health care dollar. Most people think that percentage is much smaller than it is. So what that means is that we're already paying what we need to to have a good single payer system - through the government- We may not need any new taxes at all- UNLESS we don't switch to single payer, and that would be a huge mistake because then everything breaks- Again, the reasons are fairly simple. the biggest reason is that single payer works because its single- its the only game in town, and systems that are not single payer but pretend to be cannot access any of the benefits by only doing one or two things differently, that, simply does not work.

For example, you cannot have insurance companies side by side with single payer, its one or the other. This is because the requirement that health insurance companies be coddled ad remain profitable cripples a public system which invariably becomes a system of last resort for the poor and destitute, and those who have no other alternatives, which makes it much more expensive because the risk pool is composed of the sickest people and the healthy people have fled to private insurance because of cost. In other words the public system cannot be free f there is a requirement to coddle private insurers, because if the public system was free, then people who bought insurance would effectively be paying twice. That would destroy the ability of the system to offer quality care because the wealthy would likely want to pay extra and get good healthcare and the government system would be compelled by something called "competition theory" to only offer abbreviated health care in such a way that nobody who had the money would want it (also, they would be excluded to force them to buy commercial offerings)

So, there are a lot of other interesting things about single payer- but this is the basics. Single payer would merge all of the various forms of health care into one. there would no longer be a need for separate administrative entities - they would all be merged into one. Hospitals and doctors and other health care providers would have a single paint of payment, which for that reason, would have to be a good one. It would not be an option for it to be bad because everybody in the country would suffer if it was.