I sent you long email describing. Basically I'd like to see public subsidized or free health care at the NHS level (i.e. kind of crap, but good enough), with available free relatively-unregulated private insurance and private care. I figure it would cost $1-2k/person/yr for the public side (excluding old people in medicare, which is another huge problem), which is a lot less than is spent now covering marginally insured people, overhead of medicaid, etc. I'd get employers totally out of the insurance game.

This is politically unpopular (some people WILL get lower quality free care under this plan than they get today, and some people might get lower quality care than under employer-provided care, if they choose to spend the savings on something else like food or education, which might be rational!) Also, I think the US Government is possibly more incompetent in running healthcare (I work in DoD healthcare, so I see this firsthand...) than the UK or Canadians or French.