No value. There's no risk in providing health insurance to 200 million people. They are, like the journal publishers, just taking advantage of a collective acti

No value. There's no risk in providing health insurance to 200 million people. They are, like the journal publishers, just taking advantage of a collective action problem. Even worse, Obamacare enshrined them into law and attempted to make it a fineable offense not to buy their products. Its an entirely parasitic industry, and most of its overhead is dedicated to figuring out ways not to provide health care. That being said, the only stable function of current Western governments are the graft networks. Everything else either runs by itself or doesn't run at all. They can only function as people expect government to function during emergencies, and that's largely because they can hand out contracts quickly with little review, and possibly use them as pretenses to put long planned projects into action. The countries that have had fully functioning state health care have been spending the 21st century trying their best to dismantle them and sell them off. That being said, Krugman is another on the list of recently unemployed extreme partisan shills frantically trying to rebrand now that the corporate world sees the Democrats as a sinking ship. He was originally an amazing, careful economist, but happily prostitutes his achievements for praise and cash. > So you could make the case that at this point private health insurance is, in large part, a parasitical racket. At which point at least some readers will ask me why I didn’t back Bernie Sanders in his call for single-payer, Medicare for all. > The answer is that this call was and remains politically unrealistic. It was politically unrealistic because Democrats campaigned day and night against it, suddenly becoming tax hawks and pretending that they didn't understand how much premiums were, because they were paid to, and Krugman lined up at the trough. Single-payer had far more than supermajority support from the Democratic base, and had achieved majority support from Republicans during the Obama administration, with bipartisan public disgust at Obamacare (other than the Medicaid expansion, which had nothing to do with the Heritage through Romney plan, but was used to confuse the public.) He trots out the industry line: > The more important problem is that most Americans with employer-sponsored health insurance are happy with their coverage But ignores the direct questions about single payer that were asked, poll after poll. He's a dog, and stating the obvious. The reason 90% of the public landed between shrugging and cheering when a law-abiding, successful businessman with a wife and children was gunned down in public in cold blood is not because people are satisfied with their healthcare. If the US spent the same % of GDP on healthcare as any other country, it would have been in surpluses for decades.