To be completely fair, we don't actually know that health care pays for itself. The RAND Health Insurance experiment and the Oregon Medicaid experiment found li

To be completely fair, we don't actually know that health care pays for itself. The RAND Health Insurance experiment and the Oregon Medicaid experiment found little improvement in health outcomes and a significant increase in medical spending when insurance was expanded. Those studies are hard to make because it's hard to measure medical outcomes. For example, for the Oregon experiment they couldn't look into differences in death rates because death rates were too low even among uninsured people. They had to look at cholesterol, blood sugar and other proxies for health outcomes, instead of the outcomes themselves. This suggests that at some point further spending in health has diminishing returns and we don't actually know if we reached that point yet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Medicaid_health_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Medicaid_health_experim... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND_Health_Insurance_Experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND_Health_Insurance_Experime...