The insurance and pharmaceutical industries are certainly being deferred to to some extent, but those industries employ a lot of people, and the last thing we need to do in this economy is put more people in danger of losing their jobs.
That's sort of a
broken-window argument, though, at least regarding the insurance "industry". You could pay for a
lot of unemployment benefit for former medical-insurer employees with the overall cost benefits of (say) the NHS over the current US system, and the NHS is far from a model of efficiency. Or, alternatively, they could all get jobs doing something productive instead.
I agree with you that the priority is getting healthcare for all -- and that whether this happens through general taxation, or through public insurance, or through private insurance, is a detail Congress can decide on whichever way they like. But if they go down the private insurance route, I don't think Barack Obama will get his wish to be the last president to have to deal with the mess.
Peter
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