If I understand your article, it seems you are arguing that all healthcare should be free to the patient’s family, perhaps with monthly payments of some nominal amount they can afford.

If we maintain the high quality and rapid response and availability of care that the US now provides, that would simply bury all of us in high taxes. Someone always has to pay.

It should be obvious that we can’t give everyone unlimited access to the government treasuries to cover unlimited healthcare. In your case, a great many families’ premiums went entirely to cover only your expenses; clearly, it wouldn’t take very many such cases to deplete the reserves.

But perhaps you intended to focus only on covering the catastrophic cases with public funds, which would be more pertinent to your case. Let private insurance cover everything that isn’t catastrophic. That might be done, in principle. If carefully crafted to keep insurance companies from suddenly discovering that all major expenses were catastrophic.

This is where I think that the ACA (Obamacare) law went wrong. Instead of solving the problems of catastrophic expenses and preexisting conditions, ACA attempted to bring all healthcare, however major or minor, under the same umbrella. That can’t work, and it has not. It’s like trying to force your auto collision insurance to also cover all your oil changes and maintenance.

The problem that needed fixing was people with such serious problems that they were driven bankrupt and without insurance, not forcing policies on everyone for checkups, flu shots and birth control. Catastrophe is what ACA should have solved.