It's needed for medium distance trips that mass transit doesn't serve, like getting from an airport to a specific destination where transit would take far too many transfers.

Depends on how you define medium distance here. Probably it is not "two bus stops away", but rather "neither inside the city, nor between them". Then suburban tranins like these.

• mass transit to go longer distances and along busy routes
• walking and cycling for short distances

Agreed, but cycling for short distance(depending on definition) in city most of times less convenient that walking or using regular scooter(which in some countries legally same as walking). But this depends on infrastructure, and I can imagine cases where it is more convenient: when you can store bycicle without moving it upstairs. For same reason it is very convenient to use bycicles in rural areas.

Without competition, you can only manage price through political channels, which just results in lobbying and cronyism.

1. I should have mentioned it is about competetion between public and private healthcare. At least diagnosing and treatment part. Something MRI or CT is fine because I think it is almost impossible to cut corners here, so race to the bottom should have no negative impact here. But with something like lab tests cutting corners can lead to more false results.
2. Who chooses? If patient, then most of the times metric used by patient is not quality of medicine. If not, then it's either academia channels or political channels.
3. Kinda repeats 1, but because of 2, I think competition based on price is very bad for healthcare.
4. Having private healthcare results in a lot more of lobbying and cronyism than not having it. And what UHC would lobby for? More healthcare for everyone? Isn't that entire purpose of UHC?

Having paying customers choose one provider over another establishes pricing tiers, and properly rewards better providers and punishes worse providers.

1. Pricing tiers... Life shouldn't have pricing tiers.
2. While I belive, that future generations will have better education, even then most of the times patient's quality metric is not quality of healthcare itself. Unless instead of doctors there are bunch of homeopathic chiropracts. I said about patient instead of society(customer) because society's choice is definition of political channels. At least in democracies.

The issue is that many people don't feel comfortable making decisions on medical care (everyone wants "the best"), but I think there needs to be pressure or there's little incentive to stand out and do a better job than everyone else.

1. About quality metric above
2. The only way to do better job than everyone else in healthcare is possible when everyone else misdiagnoses or mistreats. And this can only made possible through scientific research. Capitalism loves to use results of science, but hates doing science, take patent law as example of this.

The more the government gets involved, the more gov't palace building you'll see.

Academy of Sciences existed over 4 political systems and over 4 economic systems. Even under Putinism it doesn't look like goverment place as most corporations. What we call goverment place look should better be called along the lines of dictatorship place look. Because this is how power that does not represent interests of society should be called.

But refusing to serve someone in an emergency because they haven't kept up on preventative care is unethical.

True. My point wasn't preventative care instead of emergency, but preventative care should be if not part of UHC, then at least provided to every citizen by state.

That said, I think people don't get preventative care due to cost, and preventative care is expensive because of a variety of stupid reasons that I think would largely go away if most people paid cash.

Especially if their entire bill is 0.

But that's the thing, it doesn't need to be limited. Doctors don't want competition so they put pressure to discourage new doctors. Insurance companies also make it difficult for new doctors because they demand high certifications.

1. Maybe I should have said said finite, maybe some other wording. What I wanted to say amount of doctors is not infinite. So there WILL be a queue.
2. It seems to depend on country, but here the only "certification" is degree in medicine.
3. "Doctors don't want competition so they put pressure to discourage new doctors" is consequence of turning science into capitalism.

If medicine is restructured, your regular doctor could be a nurse, and you'd only go to a doctor if you had something the nurse couldn't handle (rare).

Nurse that can diagnose is called feldsher. Has secondary special education(between secondary and higher).

That tax is for Medicare, which only serves the elderly (65+) and very specific other groups.

That's why I said too little.

Medicare is widely well regarded, and politicians want to expand it to everyone as a public option. But if we do that, I'm concerned it'll cost a lot more and they'll stop fighting so hard to keep prices under control (classic monopoly issues).

1. As I understand until from my sofa, until recently Medicare couldn't negotiate drug prices and only bought them at any price manufacturer said.
2. Except it is classic monopsony. Monopsony fights to keep price as low as possible, contrary to monopoly.

I think Medicare is best when it's competing with private health insurance.

Maybe. Maybe not. Medicine is not making chairs or making phones.

If everything moved to public insurance, we'd have pressure to cut physician salaries (they're a much smaller lobby than pharma), which reduces attractiveness of medicine as a career, which would increase wait times and whatnot.

This is valid concern. Result here doesn't seem completely predictable to me, because as I understand physician's wage is disconnected from price private hospitals charge. Cutting salaries is likely, but not the only outcome, because a lot of money was spent on communicating with private insurances.

Maybe we should roll it out to the poor, but I don't it should be universal, at least not in the US.

Having healthcare is better than not having it, but if it will be limited to poor and old, then it will be heavily underfunded like public transport.

Eh, $10k for each kid averages out over the long term.

I mean in certain somecountries it is part of UHC.

I then get $2k/year as a credit for each child until they're 17, so that's nice.

Better than nothing.