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I find it interesting that people posting on this subject studiously avoid the most basic - and defining - truth of our health care system: We have universal health care. We just do an incredibly inefficient job of delivering it. No one will be denied care just because they have no insurance and no money. So if you let companies or individuals "select out" the high risk individuals, that just pushes them onto somebody else's bill - eventually, some level of government. And the process of playing a financial zero sum game with a universal health care system like ours ensures that a tremendous amount of wasted time, energy, and money is spent on the musical chairs game of "who gets stuck with the bill."
Don't like "ambulance chasing lawyers"? Guess what - with single payer there's no point to the chase. I'm rarely directly involved in injury cases, but I have gotten a view into the behind the scenes fighting over which insurance company has to pay a particular medical bill. Talk about a lawyer's full employment act!
Not having a single payer system of some type warps our society in more ways than you guys can imagine. The hidden and unanticipated costs of funding medical care through the patchwork of overlapping, mutually exclusive, and otherwise byzantine systems of reimbursement for medical care is a huge drag on our nation's pocketbook and psyche. If there weren't some huge corporations making huge sums of money of the status quo we'd have fixed this travesty long ago.
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