[redler]

Under the US system, everyone's savings is also lower -- because of extremely high insurance premiums, co-pays, coinsurance, deductibles, high out-of-pocket payment maximums, uncovered care, predatory billing complexity designed to minimize "medical loss", lesser job mobility due to linkage of employment with the ability to get medical care, far higher drug prices, and so forth. It's a system full of holes into which almost anyone without wealth can fall -- even people with good insurance.

If you simplify and subtract the need for intermediaries to extract profit from this kind of system, remove all risk of anyone in the country being personally financially destroyed by their health care needs, remove from US businesses the obligation to manage and pay for their share of their employee health benefits, and distribute the resulting costs across the entire population, would you argue that would somehow cost more? That the resulting "higher taxes" would exceed the lowering of all the systemic, business, and personal costs and risk above?