Not dying or languishing in pain sounds like a pretty awesome benefit. And indeed, that’s the problem with health care: when one needs it, one will pay almost anything to the provider.
Prices are a communication: they signal customers how to ration goods, and producers how to produce them. The higher the price, the fewer the customers but the more the producers; the lower the prices, the more the customers but the fewer the producers. In a free economy, it is possible to say that the work output of one FAANG engineer is economically worth that of 5 New York City garbagemen or 10 Podunk, Idaho janitors or 35 burger-flippers.
How many rolls of toilet paper is one vial of insulin worth? Infinitely more, to someone who doesn’t need insulin. Some fraction, for someone who does. Some really small fraction, for someone who needs it right now. It doesn’t make any sense for all three of those people to pay the same price, for either the toilet paper or the insulin.
In a single-payer system, how much does the single payer pay? How much do the producers of health care (e.g., physicians, surgeons, nurses, medical researchers, pharmaceutical factories) get paid? It ends up being based on the whims of the people setting those prices (a wage is just a labour price), not on any fundamental voice of the market — and thus it is either too high, or too low, and there is no feedback mechanism to constrain it. And that means society will produce either too little or too much health care, which means it will produce too much or too little of other things.
