[duxup]

Do we really know what single payer would do with any certainty?

There's not really been a real test what a healthcare system with any kind of "natural" market forces at work. The current system is just a mess of tax breaks, middle man companies, hidden pricing, strange federal and local laws, employer choices and so on...

Even when someone talks about single payer, I'm still unsure what they imagine that looks like.

[wakawaka28]

Similar things have been tried in other countries, and they have different failure modes. Ultimately the basic laws of economics predict with high accuracy what would happen. Now, I will grant that the current system is not based on the free market and might be substantially improved by changing to a different system, but the free market would solve problems created by all of the interventions that have been tried. Healthcare might still be unaffordable for some, but that is true of many scarce and desirable resources anyway.