Instead of having a plan developed behind closed doors and then you have to vote for it to find out what is in it, you legislate the old fashioned way, congressional vote by vote. “A return to regular order“.

The great advantage of this is its great disadvantage. Congress cannot centrally plan the economy, or any significant part of the economy. No one central plan can receive a majority vote, or even a large plurality. Your are only going to get two or three percent to vote for one central plan, and four or five percent for another, and three or four percent for yet another, because there is a near infinity of possible central plans, any one of which is going to step on lots of people’s toes, each plan stepping on a different set of toes. You can never socialize medicine, or anything else, by congressional vote, except they vote for a closed box and discover to their big surprise what is in it when it gets implemented.

Before Obamacare, American medicine was unreasonably expensive by a factor of about ten or twenty.

After Obamacare, American medicine was unreasonably expensive by a factor of about ten or twenty, but bums, drug addicts, and vagrants were getting a lot more of this very expensive medicine, paid for mostly by white middle class males, and very shortly thereafter, white middle class males were getting a whole lot less of this very expensive medicine. Obamacare wanted more care for the poor, but it sought to prevent the total consumption of care from rising, for fear that would accelerate the already excessive price pressures, so a reduction in access to care by white middle class males was planned and intended from the beginning, though I don’t think anyone wanted to admit just how drastic and radical a reduction they had in mind.

The way to substantially reduce the cost of medical care is to have a free market in medical care with well known, well defined, and advertised prices, as in Singapore. At present, no one knows how much care is going to cost, and prices are frequently absurd by world standards. There is no good reason why a treatment in America should cost ten or twenty times what unsubsidized, for-profit, care, paid for out of pocket, costs in Taiwan and Singapore.

Genuine advances in medical care make medicine more expensive, as things can now be (expensively) treated that formerly could not be treated. But this fails to explain the enormous discrepancy in healthcare prices between America, and prices charged by private enterprise, for profit, healthcare businesses in Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, and India.