> What you say is true about the public option, because it incentivizes insurance companies to dump expensive patients onto the public dole, while charging ever increasing premiums for those who either don’t need healthcare or are self-rationing because of things like co-pays or high-deductibles.
Can you explain why this is supposed to be true? The benefit of a "public option" is supposed to be that it would theoretically reduce costs by eliminating insurance company profits. The government insurer would presumably still charge premiums and set them based on actuarial risk, so why would it disproportionately attract high risk patients? It's not as if private insurers would be allowed to cancel your policy after you get sick and dump you on the public insurer.
> It’s not true for single payer systems, who across the world pay less than what we pay in the US. Without special pleading, you have to explain why they’re able to do it and we cannot, otherwise it seems that you’re ignoring the evidence.
The explanation is simple. With single payer the government is a monopsony buyer, so it "negotiating prices" is really just equivalent to price controls. Price controls can certainly lower prices, but they do so by creating shortages.
In medicine the primary cost isn't the unit cost of manufacturing the pill, it's the R&D cost of developing it and performing clinical trials. So the shortage is of medical R&D. Price controls reduce the supply of new medicines -- that is what other countries do to have lower costs. They piggyback on all the money paid by patients in the US and used to develop new medications that are then used all over the world.
So the US pays more for drugs because the rest of the world isn't paying their fair share of the R&D and we're subsidizing them.