The same lifestyle diseases are at the top of the list for every country that already has some form of universal health care.

It's not really moral hazard, since that implies a rational choice is being made to make themselves sick because they know that they won't be bearing the financial costs. However, there are a plethora of non-financial costs to the diseases you've mentioned - up to and including death - so the moral hazard is mostly avoided.

It's simply that some people make irrational, bad choices, and the incentives on the whole make no difference.

The basic problem is the cost. The cost of health care is so outrageous the only way to make it bearable on the population is just to give the government a license to print unlimited money in order to pay everyone's health care bills.

Insurance (which is a horrible system for health care, since insurance depends on people who buy it not to use it, and all of us need health care, usually multiple times per year) and government programs merely mask the root of all of this, which is that health care is completely and utterly unsustainable at its current rates. Something has to change about the way we administer medicine because nobody can afford it.

Everyone outside of the US has seen that people can't afford it and instead of fixing it, they've just said "the government will pay whatever it costs, don't worry any more, peasants!" In the US the problem has existed so long because we've covered it with insurance companies, but that system is crumbling as it gets harder for anyone without a job at BigCo to get reasonable care.

Our options are to figure out how to make health care cost a reasonable and affordable amount of money or let the government print money to fix it all for all of us (in the short term, ignoring the consequences of printing a bunch of money to keep an unsustainable system alive).

The current plan to force everyone in the United States onto an insurance policy with minimal modifications from existing policies is a pretty bad plan imo. The rates will be about the same and I'm sure the insurance companies are going to be thrilled to get tens of millions of new customers to suck dry by legal mandate. The people that will qualify for state subsidized insurance rates are only a handful more than the people that currently qualify for state medical programs like Medicaid anyway.

I'd have up voted you if you hadn't said "period". Unhealthy behavior is a biggie but anyone that says "here, this ONLY is the problem" just adds to the mess.

The US health care system is melange of many complex and perverse incentives. I recall a study saying unhealthy behavior adds at most 50% to costs but costs have increased many more times than that in the last thirty years. The billing system, medical education system, end-of-life-care, the health insurance system, ad-nauseum. It takes a LOT of crazy schemes to eat up 20% of the GDP of the once-most-prosperous country in the world.