If you want a more fair system for everyone, in fact you need to remove about $1.5 trillion (~42%; equivalent to two copies of the US military) from annual US h

If you want a more fair system for everyone, in fact you need to remove about $1.5 trillion (~42%; equivalent to two copies of the US military) from annual US healthcare spending. That just gets you down to matching what most Western European nations are spending per capita. $3.6 trillion goes into US healthcare, providing healthcare workers - including doctors and nurses - with among the highest salaries and benefits vs their peers globally. You have to go to Switzerland to find comparable industry pay. That is five times more than what is spent on the military. You can't slash enough spending out of the military to make a dent in that gigantic expense problem. It's not the healthcare workers suffering in the US system, it's the patients that are suffering from paying the wildly inflated salaries in the field. If you want a more fair system, you'll need to start by reducing incomes in the industry to levels you see in Britain, France or Germany. That means slashing doctor and nurse pay across the board. You have to shift the system toward the benefit of patients and away from the workers in healthcare. You'll also need to smash the US education system for healthcare simultaneously and remove the guild protection racket that makes becoming a doctor so expensive (you can't normalize US healthcare pay without normalizing the education costs). You have to get spending down to near $2 trillion to create a system comparable to what you see in Western Europe, so you need to slash $1.5 trillion in spending. That means you need to fire massive numbers of doctors and nurses, squeeze resources (ration service as in all universal systems), and slash pay for every single worker in the industry. A hazard bonus as part of one of the stimulus programs for front-line workers? Sure why not. None of it is going to be paid back anyway, it's all going to be perpetually monetized by the Fed. They deserve it in my opinion. That's very different from discussing the cost problem in military vs healthcare however. We need to remove maybe $150-$200 billion from the military to get down to a more reasonable spending level for what the US should be doing. You don't fix the biggest problem in healthcare - the extreme spending per capita - by adding more spending.