The basic “big picture” is that other countries with single payer or socialized medicine pay less per capital by a large amount, live longer healthier lives, and patients don’t lose their homes in bankruptcy. If they can do we can do it.
The flaw in that "data set" is that the populations are not similar.
1) As Americans, we eat like @#$% on average. It makes us far far unhealthier and that greatly impacts our health and longevity.
2) Socialized medicine = rationed care. That rationing can be mild, or severe, but in the end that results in a not-insignificant number of patients dying before they are seen and utilize medical resources. This artificially deflates the cost of care per captia in those countries.
3) Bankruptcy laws can be changed, should we desire. But one thing to note here is that behavior among Americans for their "last days" is very different than many other countries. We want EVERYTHING done to prolong our lives, and that is extremely costly, especially when we are talking hospitalization and cutting edge medicine. When I was practicing, I saw FAR LESS of this mindset from people of other countries and faiths. If we told them something was terminal (like an inoperable brain tumor), they would often chose palliative care, even when we as Drs. would sometimes push for the other.
You make valid arguments, I'm not trying to dismiss (all) of them. Just bear in mind that this is not fully an apples to apples comparison and things are much more difficult to boil down to something simple, like the politicians would like us to believe.
