They are most certainly not making absurd profits. Health insurance companies get a 3.3% profit margin, which is pitiful. Banking and real estate companies make over 20% profit margins. Tell me, how is that modest 3.3% unreasonable?
Banking and real estate are also full of terrible business practices that desperately need to be regulated. But that is a separate issue.
I came across some interesting reading while researching your point. Below is an article describing how insurance companies are actively complicit in medical prices being high. They don't actually actually care that hospitals over bill. The primary purpose they are supposed to provide (being an advocate for keeping costs down) they aren't even doing. I honestly can't see that the insurance industry serves any purpose at all other than to milk money out of people.
We do not get rid of the middleman by getting rid of private insurance. We replace the insurance companies with government bureaucracy.
But you are removing a middle man. You are removing a for profit company that is trying to make money off of the system and replacing it with a government agency that is not trying to milk more money out of sick people. An insurance company doesn't have any interest in helping you or making sure you get the care you need. Their goal is to make money. So if they can prevent you claiming insurance, they will. And if they can't, they will just raise your rates the next year so they get all that (and more) back. A government agency isn't going to deny you service and they aren't going to raise your rates on you when you get sick. They will also actually advocate to lower prices where insurance companies won't.
I keep hearing that this will raise worker productivity, but by how much?
It's hard to be certain. Here is a link to an article looking at the effects universal healthcare had in Jamaica. It lowered sick day usage by 28%-34%. That is approximately 2.15 additional hours of labor per week. That is alot of worker productivity. One of the main reasons is that people with no insurance (or have a large deductible) don't get frequent health screenings and are likely not to seek medical attention for something if it isn't urgent. this lets minor medical issues that could be fixed turn into big medical issues that cost way more time and money to fix. You save alot of time and money if everyone can afford to get regular medical treatment.
And why couldn't raising competition and lowering regulation help drive down costs instead to prevent said bankruptcies?
How would you raise competition? They don't want to compete. They know that if everyone doubles their prices over what it actually costs, they will all make more than if they compete for prices. How would you force them to do that?
Lowering regulation is literally the worst idea. You are essentially saying that if you just cut rules the greedy, for profit companies have to follow then somehow that will result in them providing lower prices. There is absolutely no reason to think that cutting regulation would cause them to charge people less. They will charge as much as they can possibly get away with. Which the current system incentivizes them to do.
I don't believe that it will be better coverage unless it costs tons more, unless you price fix.
I'm guessing you mean price fix in the sense that the government decides what the price is. When the better way to look at it is fixing the price (as in repairing something that is broken). Hospitals regularly charge way, way more for services than it costs. Insurance companies have no incentive to fight them because they can always just squeeze that money out of people anyway. It is more profitable for them to be friendly with the hospitals than to advocate for cheaper care. If America had a single payer system, then the insurer (the government) would actually have a reason to push back when hospitals charge double or triple the amount they should.
They also would save huge amounts on administration costs. Some estimates put the current cost of administrative costs at over 1 trillion per year. The convoluted mess that is the current system is a huge part of that. If all claims were going to 1 place and that process was always the same, this could be streamlines and reduced. You could save hundreds of billions of dollars by simplifying this with a single payer system.
Then, that is how you get absurd wait times,
I agree it would increase wait times. But it is easy to keep wait times low when a large percentage of the population can't afford care. Essentially america keeps wait times low by pushing poor people out of the line. If you think you should get care faster by letting poor people die, then I guess you can go on believing that.
shortages of products,
If companies can earn a profit on a product they will produce it. They don't need a 50%-20,000% markup on it in order to produce it. The idea that controlling costs would lead to shortages is just ridiculous.
and stifled innovation.
Here is an article discussing that. The large majority of new drugs are funded by the government. Then a private company snatches them up, does a little bit of tweaking to them and sells them at a massive markup. The for profit companies take all the profit while government labs do much of the work. So no, you are not going to stifle innovation because much of that is government funded anyway.
