> We want employers to provide benefits, as opposed to the government because that means higher taxes
This is a silly argument. You pay for your healthcare no matter what, it's just a question of who administers it.
> Then you put a million exclusions and tax deductions and other loopholes, so no one knows what they're really getting
This is precisely the current state of employer-sponsored healthcare, and also the wildly complicated medicare/medicaid system.
Universal coverage combined with higher taxes (ideally on people who already have lots of money and therefore place very little value on marginal income) is arguably better and easier to reason about than a mandate for employer-provided coverage and its associated opaque and complicated effects on labor markets, including higher fixed costs of hiring people and decreased ability for people to move between regions, industries, and even jobs within the same industry/career.
> This is a silly argument. You pay for your healthcare no matter what, it's just a question of who administers it.
But who administers it has a lot to do with how much you pay for it. For example, a high deductible plan will save you a lot of money as long as you aren't in the 99th percentile of healthcare needs, and (unless the deductible is really high) still not bankrupt you if it turns out you are.
Any kind of government plan that doesn't give you that choice because it's paid from taxes rather than premiums is plausibly going to cost you more money. And that's true even on average, because high deductible plans make people more price sensitive, which exerts downward pressure on costs. (The fact that US healthcare regulations disfavor high deductible plans is one of the reasons costs remain high.)
The US system is also uniquely screwed because the rest of the world piggybacks on US medical R&D while in practice regulating prices even for products under patent. The result is that the US market is paying a disproportionate share of the R&D cost. Cost comparisons to single payer systems that pretend that single payer systems are inherently less expensive are ignoring the lower contribution of those systems to worldwide medical R&D. Moreover, the recipient companies are disproportionately in the US and have lobbyists and large numbers of voter-employees, so implementing a single payer system here would be unlikely to remove those costs. Then you're left with the resulting increase in price insensitivity and the US system becomes even more unaffordable.
It's actually a hard problem. The solution probably has to involve the other countries paying more of the R&D.
> This is precisely the current state of employer-sponsored healthcare, and also the wildly complicated medicare/medicaid system.
I'm happy to talk about manufacturer drug rebates which is an amazingly crazy portion of the healthcare market that would be illegal in almost any other market due to the perverse market incentives it creates. But yea, the short version is that the private healthcare market is incredibly inefficient.
This is a silly argument. You pay for your healthcare no matter what, it's just a question of who administers it.
> Then you put a million exclusions and tax deductions and other loopholes, so no one knows what they're really getting
This is precisely the current state of employer-sponsored healthcare, and also the wildly complicated medicare/medicaid system.
Universal coverage combined with higher taxes (ideally on people who already have lots of money and therefore place very little value on marginal income) is arguably better and easier to reason about than a mandate for employer-provided coverage and its associated opaque and complicated effects on labor markets, including higher fixed costs of hiring people and decreased ability for people to move between regions, industries, and even jobs within the same industry/career.