@JPB,
It's not as simple as that JPB. If it was it would have been done.
There's a significant cost in HC because it costs. We don't pay those costs in the UK. Not theoretically anyway. We don't have clocks running, and records of them translated into invoices which are sent out to be processed by those who receive them and possibly argued over. It is a significant cost to charge.
Whatever deficiences free UHC produces have to be set against the saving of those costs and if those deficiences can be reduced by good management then the cost saving can either go to lower taxes, which is usually unlikely, or to further improvements in HC.
Most of those who derive their living from the cost of charging will, human nature being as it is, be opposed to free UHC. They would be superfluous.
And a densely populated urban state would have different priorities than a thinly populated rural state.
As our Health Minister found when he introduced the NHS on the tick of a clock, just like that, as Tommy Cooper used to say, there is no sense in arguing about it. You either do it or you don't.
Half measures will leave you still bearing the costs of charging if only because some people will be charged at the zero rate and that invoice takes processing too as does also the entitlement to free care where not all get it.
Once you have what you call "certain minimum standards", which is the easy way to argue, you will have a majority to which they will apply and that majority will translate at elections into higher standards until you get to the point which we are almost at where those who have paid into insurance funds for years are seeing no better standards than those the rest of us get for "free" assuming we accept the taxes needed to fund it. Which we do.
It's a leadership problem. If Mr Obama can't pull his rank all you will get, it seems to me, is a long and costly wrangle. It's a Gordian Knot issue.
It might be worth a single issue campaign for re-election. And let the voters decide at the polling stations rather than trying to in useless slanging matches.
