Your thesis is that people so broadly support additional tax money going to fix the 22 year old that it could be legitimate law, but somehow so few support it that charity or other alternatives (if the very people that support it weren't forced by law) would be a ridiculous trope?

You're defeating your own argument.

No. My thesis is that we can reduce total healthcare spending by having a single-payer system that covers everyone.

It's not additional tax money, it's money that doesn't need to go to corporate jets and huge pay packages for the C-Suite and large dividends for the shareholders of insurance companies, healthcare providers, pharmaceutical companies and medical equipment manufacturers.

And the tens to hundreds of billions we save on that can pay for that 22 year old.

But we can't have that, now can we? Better to Brian Kilmeade 'em, eh?

> corporate jets and huge pay packages for the C-Suite and large dividends for the shareholders of insurance companies

And armies and armies of middle-folk who are adjudicating from afar whether a given medical procedure is justified or not.

The way the US practices paying for medicine is, counter-intuitively, very expensive because we pay a lot of people to find reasons to justify not paying for it. If we took their salaries and put them into actual service provision, and cut down the vast web of categories and sub-categories to salami-slice the nickels and dimes, we'd spend far less on employment of arbiters and on paperwork and we'd have more money to pay for more services (and no a priori reason to believe the system would oversaturate).

But you just said it's a ridiculous trope that people would want to charitably donate to the healthcare of others. How would you get the majority to support a single payer system when electing to help others is such a ridiculous trope that you flippantly dismiss it?

> But you just said it's a ridiculous trope that people would want to charitably donate to the healthcare of others. How would you get the majority to support a single payer system when electing to help others is such a ridiculous trope that you flippantly dismiss it?

A lot of people have a broken sense of fairness where they're only willing to help someone else if everyone else is required to do it too. It's one of the things causing the world to burn.

Some of this is even learned behavior. A lot of the dumbest econ 101 classes teach people that giving to charity is irrational. (It's not irrational. It's something you do because you want to do it, like eating cake or buying a fast car. Once your basic needs are met, the purpose of having money is to use it for the things you want to use it for. It's not irrational to want to do something good instead of something insalubrious.)