Earlier quoted context omitted.
We did not try eliminating government from healthcare. In fact many of the high cost of private payments arise from regulation or a tragedy of the commons situation introduced by government (i.e. ER required to take everyone but with no answer how to pay).
Even if we just let the pesky poors die, the US healthcare system would still be more expensive on a per use basis than the rest of the world. Now sure, the absolute amount spent would probably be lower if we just assumed that people that couldn't produce paperwork to prove they could fund their ER visit didn't deserve to live. If you prefer zero taxes and zero life expectancy for anyone unfortunate enough to need li…
Your premise was we have some kind of private system; my thesis is the uncovered poor would be better off with that than whatever it is we have now where they can maybe go to the ER "free" but otherwise pay a gazillion dollars in regulatory and other imposed costs if they actually try to get some prophylaxis.
If you want to say universal healthcare could be better than whatever we have now -- sure I won't disagree with that. Right now we have about the worst imaginable public-private bastardized system replete with deep regulatory capture.
>If you prefer zero taxes and zero life expectancy for anyone unfortunate enough to need lifesaving treatment they can't afford, that's a perfectly valid preference
... this is not my thesis at all, as you're relying on "can't afford" being at the level it is now where the poor are being billed for all manner of things they wouldn't be in an actually private free market and you're also relying an an absurd premise there will be no charity or any other options for them. For instance, in the Philippines I could just walk into a private pharmacy and buy penicillin essentially no questions asked to treat strep throat on the private market for ~half a day's local wages. (Yes Philippines have public healthcare and hospitals but you're not gonna get that meaningfully in some rural barangay). In USA it takes me 1-2 days wages to treat strep throat because I must go to a doctor to write me magic piece of paper that say I will not go in a cage for having a prescription drug, pay all his regulatory overhead, pay regulatory overhead for a lab, then go to a highly regulated pharmacist and then buy my antibiotics from probably the highest-barrier industry in the US through an anointed company and supply chain blessed by the government. I am much better off having cheap, but non-free antibiotics to treat strep than having to wait until it becomes Scarlet Fever and going to the ER for "free" or being taxed into oblivion to get "free" antibiotics that are then administered in the most bloated and uncompetitive way by government to the point I give up other necessities to pay the tax.