> Under the gov't version, if you were healthy, you're "free". You only cost when you actually need the medical treatment.
Government insurance is still insurance. It isn't that each individual costs the government $10,000, it's that most cost them nothing and one in ten gets cancer and costs $100,000. Insurance is the same. The large majority of the money isn't going to the insurance company, it's going to healthcare providers.
> By making medical treatment a tax payer funded scheme, the cost of an unhealthy society is spread out amongst all.
This is literally the definition of how insurance works. It's also why insurance sucks, because it allows people to make risky/unhealthy choices and socialize the costs of those choices, and therefore why high deductible insurance is more efficient by introducing at least some price sensitivity.
> Not only does this give the gov't buying pressure to lower the margins of all medical treatments
This is equivalent to legislating prices. They can already do this regardless, but it's a bad idea for the same reason price controls in general are. How do you determine what the price should be? Too high and you're overpaying, too low and you force providers to lower the quality of care to meet the price target. If this was so easy then why wouldn't the insurance companies be doing it too?
> it also makes a policy pressure for gov't to give preventative measures for good health outcomes (like legislating low sugar foods, or incentivize exercise and good diet etc).
Couldn't they do this anyway? Also, wouldn't they have the opposite incentives, because then the companies making blood pressure medicine or whatever would lobby against any such programs, and be more proficient lobbyists because they're already dealing with the government to begin with?
And if the government really is so much more efficient then they should easily be able to out-compete the insurance companies and other healthcare providing systems on fair terms in a competitive marketplace, right?