The idea of employers providing health care is an outgrowth of yet another government monkeywrench thrown into the private sector: wage controls. Benefits were the loophole that allowed employers to attract employees.

Now it's a given that health care is something that is employer-provided, although no other form of insurance falls into this category. My employers do not provide car insurance, or fire insurance, or earthquake insurance. Some provide life insurance, although I get mine myself.

If we could break that paradigm, we'd be getting somewhere. Good luck doing it, though.

The market process has been completely short-circuited in health care. There is no longer a major connection between prices and willingness to pay. There's a reason medical providers can charge five bucks for an aspirin. Someone will pay it, and it isn't the patient. Notice that private insurance is part of this problem, but it really got bad when Medicare was invented and the government began funneling money into the system. A graph in Consumer Reports of health care costs (which I can't find anymore) showed a distinct upward "knee" in the curve after Medicare came into being.

Of course, once you start screwing with market forces, you can't stop. Once the state pays for medical services and the costs become "transparent" to the users, massive regulations on the providers becomes essential to keep the prices from spiraling upwards. At some point, the entire medical industry, including hospitals and doctors, become for all intents and purposes an arm of the government. In the meantime, private alternatives are destroyed. It is no longer possible to buy regular comprehensive health insurance for an elderly person. Just supplements to the government programs.

"...just the basics.

If you honestly think that a "limited" government medical program would last long in "limited" form, please reexamine the history of every other entitlement created over the past century. No politician ever lost an election by promising more goodies for the voters.

In any case, the function of a government monopoly on health care is the accumulation of centralized political power, not providing the best care for the citizen. A clue: talk to a Democratic politician about means-testing such a program.

I'm pessimistic about this. I think that sooner or later our medical system will be nationalized, and the financial implosion created by putting a Canadian-style system onto a population ten times that of Canada will be stupendous. That, and people will begin to realize how much of the world's medical industry has been feeding off the innovation and skill of the American private system, and the delight the Left will feel about the collapse of the greedy pharmaceutical industries, private insurance companies, and others will be small compensation.