[jzackpete]

I'm talking about the regulatory capture of everything related to health care: medications, credentialing, insurance, etc. Any regulation imposed on the production of a good or provision of a service is a constraint on the supply. Reducing supply increases costs. I fail to see how the imposition of one insurance company (a monopoly) would improve that.

When Medicare was created, medical care accounted for less than 7% of GDP. It's around 20% now[1]. If you extrapolate life expectancy from before Medicare to now, has that massive increase in spending changed the trajectory at all?

You see the same phenomenon in higher education: we subsidize demand through government-backed loans, and costs and administrative overhead skyrockets.

[1] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spe...