Medicare for all would cost more than what we are paying now. We need to stop avoiding this fact.

[Recursion]

145. You absolutely can shop around for non emergency care

But people are stuck with the idea that Dr. Smith is "my doctor" so I'll go to him.

Even if prices were upfront for treatment, how would that help?

About how it works with dentists now. People generally pay for dental care themselves because it's cheap enough that they can, dentists advertise rates, and people choose.

You're absolutely right that single payer would vastly simplify doctors' lives (as well as put a whole lot of people out of work in the process). But that overhead is not what makes us spend twice the percent of our GDP as other countries: what'she doing that is the high coststreet that forced people into this administrative framework to begin with.

I mean, what if we did groceries the way we do health care? Groceries are absolutely necessary to stay alive too. Your employer would pick a grocery plan, which would let you shop and two grocery stores in town, and take a referral to a specialist store from your primary grocery store if you needed special foods. A Single Grocery Payer plan in which the government decided what food you could get and just paid for it probably would be more efficient than that (this would be just putting everybody on WIC and SNAP, basically). But nobody would ever suggest that, because we've actually managed the inputs here: groceries are not so expensive that people need a third party to pay for them. And that's not just an accident: the government has done lots and lots of work behind the scenes for 80 years now to keep grocery prices affordable through ag policy, transportation policy, etc.