Oh come on dude, that part was a joke. (I thought the smiley was a tipoff.) The real “public policy” issue here is that a single-payer national system does a far better job of providing universal healthcare coverage, with far lower administrative overhead costs, than our current patchwork of for-profit insurers. Do you want cites for that? I got 'em.
(And let’s be careful here not to confuse a single-payer healthcare system with a single-provider or, Og forbid, a single-product one. Nobody’s suggesting that healthcare consumers should be deprived of consumer choice in the areas where they really want it, such as selecting a doctor or deciding which elective operation(s) to have. But consumers in general don’t give a flying fuck about what logo is on the top of the insurance claim form or what address to send it to. And it’s ridiculous to insist that we ought to continue spending buckets of money on unnecessary overhead costs just to keep providing a wide variety of product choice in those areas.)
I yield to nobody in my admiration for the unparalleled efficiency of competitive, for-profit markets in providing an abundance of consumer choices at optimal prices for many kinds of important goods. But I see no point in spending millions or billions of dollars unnecessarily on a market system for goods where consumers don’t actually want lots of consumer choice, just because some starry-eyed idealist libertarians insist that consumers always ought to want choice, or might want it if it weren’t there.
As Voyager pointed out, there are a lot of people who fancy themselves smarter than government bureaucrats who actually turn out to make piss-poor financial choices. Again, this is a case where idealistic anti-government libertarian biases need to give way to pragmatic reality. If what we really need from a basic, universal pension system is reliable, predictable returns, there’s no point in lavishing money on extra overhead costs to provide lots of individual choice in investment options.
Again as Voyager noted, it’s not like a national pension system is the only opportunity you have for saving money for retirement. I’m all in favor of individual retirement savings in addition to a national system, and I support tax incentives to make such plans more attractive. You and your “superior intelligence” can play the market all day to maximize your individual retirement savings, as far as I’m concerned. But that doesn’t mean it’s economically smart to treat the basic, universal national pension system in the same way.
Again, this inspiring-sounding idea needs to pass the test of economic pragmatism. If we did replace our current pay-as-you-go tax-and-benefit social security system with a universal, government-run system of individual retirement accounts with a very limited menu of low-risk investment options, would it actually save money? Even discounting the huge transition costs, would increased returns actually outweigh the increased overhead costs of individual management? I’ve seen absolutely zero evidence so far that they would.
And if they don’t, then the idea fails the economic-pragmatism test. When it comes to basic social benefits where the crucial needs are universality and reliability, I say we should focus on satisfying those crucial needs in the cheapest possible way. Beautiful libertarian ideals about economic freedom and the theoretical advantages of markets can go blow. Show me the money.
Therefore, all the effort that goes into producing different and incompatible insurance forms, and shuffling them about from one insurance provider to another in cases of competing or conflicting claims and so forth, is just so much wasted overhead.