The concept of insurance relies on the fact that most people who pay premiums aren't going to be getting their money's worth. I've paid fire insurance on my homes for over thirty years, and have not gotten one nickel from it.

Fire insurance works because there aren't that many fires.

Health insurance works because most people don't go to the hospital very often, and most people don't have serious chronic conditions.

Obviously, there are issues with how insurance works. A lot of our increased health costs are from the ability to maintain and save lives that would not have been possible years ago. Everybody knows that a large chunk of our medical costs come from end-of-life or extreme medical areas. There is no pat answer for this. Who decides when it isn't worth the money? We also have increased mandates and controls on the industry demanding coverage for things that we may not need. All of this increases costs, and it would still be happening if the government was the insurer.

I don't know enough about diabetes to comment on the cost of treatment, or what treatments would cost $10,000 a year. I know that friends with diabetes when I was young weren't paying $10,000 a year for insulin. I suspect that your condition is not typical of the more common forms of diabetes, and requires more exotic treatments.

I could write pages on this issue. Heck, if you tally it up here, I probably already have. Many factors come into play, and they all interact. For example, the cost of approving a drug--hundreds of millions--drives a lot of things. A company has to charge huge amounts to make it back. If the government owned the drug companies, they'd have to do the same thing, or pull the money from some other place to subsidize it.

The system is therefore biased toward exotic and designer drugs (read "patented.") If someone thought aspirin could cure cancer, or an extract of dandelions could reduce blood pressure, who would pay for the hundreds of millions it would cost to formally approve a non-patentable drug for that use? There are "nutritional use" loopholes and other things that are fortunately available, but this is why alternative medicine is always on the outside, looking in the windows.

I want choices. What's wrong with that? Would it be that hard to write up reasonable laws making it easier to move from one employer-provided policy to another? Or to change tax rules to make it more cost-effective for people to start buying their own policies like they do for every other form of insurance? What about vouchers for lower-income people? Is the way the FDA approves a drug really the best way to go about it, or has the CYA factor overwhelmed everything else?

There are many ideas like this. People who are saying the other side is not coming up with alternatives or ideas are lying.

I have no problem with a government safety net for people in real need, but I don't want them pushing me off a cliff so I have to fall into that net, and that's what they're trying to do.

I don't want single-payer health care any more than I want single-payer anything in my life. Choices matter, and without competition and innovation, something notably lacking in anything the government does, costs are never coming down. There's a reason that places where the government runs everything wind up as poverty-stricken hellholes. It's not just bad luck.