I agree with a lot of what you're saying but your suggestion would be extremely hard to get through congress due to the ins lobby,dumb ass republican voters who believe the socialized medicine bull shit and republican whores in Congress as well as a few of the insurance whore democrats like Mary Landrieu and Blanche Lincoln who blocked the public option the first time imo.
If we get a medicare option I think insurance companies will eventually die out on thier own as people and employers get tired of thier bull shit and switch to medicare voluntarily.I dont think we can get them out through congress anytime soon.
I understand what you are saying, and I understand the difficulties of fighting an insurance industry that spends a billion of our premium dollars not in our best interests on political contributions and lobbying .
What we have now is of course Cartelicare. And Cartelicare is unbelievably expensive; exactly as one would expect in the case of inelastic demand in a market totally under regulatory capture , i.e., where the providers, not the public, have tailored the regulation. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand why U.S. medical care is absurdly expensive. Its cost continues to escalate well beyond the inflation rate... If we don't stop this insanity, the situation is going continue to get worse! This is not a case were the market will move spontaneously back toward sanity..
It is essential, if we get medicare for all, that it be mandatory for all and
not optional. This will allow costs to be averaged over a lifetime. What will happen otherwise is that insurers will undercut medicare premiums for the low-risk young and healthy, pushing up medicare costs for everyone else. We will be back to where we are now with private insurance covering the young and healthy and medicare covering the old and infirm.
The medicare system for people 65 and older is good, at present at least, and verging on excellent. But the cost is incredibly high, even with Medicare curbs on cost, because people have been paying in for their entire adult lifetime but only getting covered after age 65. During their working years, they are paying exorbitant premiums to for-profit insurance companies, either directly or through their employers, on top of what they are paying into medicare. It's absolutely a ridiculous arrangement.
Medicare now has a cost sharing feature. The patient pays 20% and the Government pays 80%. But 20% of $100,000 is still 20K! So people generally take out supplemental insurance to cover the 20% that medicare doesn't pay. I would expect therefore, under medicare-for-all, an opportunity for insurance companies to sell supplemental policies to cover that 20%. Assuming that if everyone was brought under medicare the 20/80 split would be kept. After we get medicare for all, the next step would be to make it transportable, so that medicare would pay up to the U.S. usual charge anywhere in the world, even for U.S. citizens who are residents of other countries.. But one thing at a time.