The fact is we are already in most cases ‘paying for someone else’s health care’. What do you think health insurance is? Insurance companies charge everyone, then pay for health services for those who use them. The thing is, the insurance companies are also paying large salaries and bonuses to executives. They are paying for advertising for their insurance plans. They are paying commissions to the sales people selling the plans. Then they are paying dividends to the stockholders of that company.
The salaries, bonuses, commissions, advertising, dividends, etc. are part of the “overhead” costs of the insurance plan. For American health insurance companies, overhead costs amount to roughly 20% of your insurance premium. So essentially 80% of what you pay for health insurance actually goes to the health care of the policy holders. With Medicare, the overhead is roughly 3% of the total costs, so 97% goes to health care.
Critics of the single payer plans have said they would cost trillions of dollars. True, but we are already paying those trillions of dollars. The difference is that one sixth of those trillions would not be going to unnecessary overhead. I could be wrong, but I suspect that if you knock out one sixth of the cost, you could cover millions more people for the same amount of money.
As to college and such, we already are paying taxes that support public education through high school, and you pay them whether you have a child in school or not. We are already paying taxes that support public universities, whether you are attending them or not. Similarly, you pay taxes that build roads whether you drive on those roads or not, and pay for fire departments, whether you have a fire or not.
Some services benefit the community as a whole, and as a society, most industrial countries spread those costs among all taxpayers, without regard to actual usage. We do the same with national defense, police departments, and many other services. How much of that is used by any one individual will vary, just as which specific services are used will vary by individual. It is more economical to provide those by shared costs than by specific charges.
Seriously, do you want to pay tolls for every mile of road you drive down? Do you want to pay cash on demand before you have your house fire put out? Do you want to pay cash before the police help you? We are always paying for a basket of services that the whole community uses. As a society we have felt it was more fair and efficient to do that.
College education is something which in truth will pay society back over the long run. More educated people make higher salaries and end up paying higher taxes over their working lives. We are making an investment in our children, just as we do with elementary and high school education. We will have some upfront costs, but frankly we have some wasteful things that could be eliminated to pay for this. We have weapons programs that do not work. We have weapons programs that even the Pentagon says we don’t need. We have subsidies to oil companies which are already enormously profitable. We have subsidies to agricultural conglomerates that are also enormously profitable.
If we have the political will, we can pay for “free” college education, by cutting the waste and cutting subsidies to companies that truly don’t need them. We also have asset give aways, like selling mineral rights on public lands for a small fraction of what would be paid for those rights on private land. We have the means to pay for those things. The question is what our priorities are.
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