[jimbokun]

This is a good economic explanation for why national health care systems should outperform employer based (or any other) systems. You can't get a larger pool of people to spread risk around, under a single legal framework, than an entire nation state.

[kscaldef]

It's not really about the overall performance or cost of coverage. The advantage, in this case, of national health care is that you can't be kicked out of the "group" (i.e. fired because you're raising the insurance premiums for the whole company), and there's no concept of "uninsurable".

[yummyfajitas]

Once you look at the numbers, you realize that beyond a certain size it doesn't matter much.

The standard deviation of health care costs for a company scales like 1/sqrt(# employees). Once (sigma cost) / sqrt(# of employees) << (mean cost), there is little advantage to having a bigger pool.