I would propose we've reached the end of the beginning. The VC fueled smallsat gold rush has ended; only the best positioned companies will survive.

People smarter than you or I have crunched the numbers. The costs assume present Medicare reimbursement rates, which are already around 60-70% of private insurance rates. Naturally, such a reduction would have knock on effects. If you wanted to reimburse more to better cover that gap, costs would probably increase.

Actually that cost figure assumes present medicare rates, which are 70% of private insurance reembursement.

Health policy is extremely complex, and there are trade offs for everything. But I do not believe it's realistic to assume providers will take a 30% reduction in payments and not have that have knock-on effects through the industry. Again, trade offs.

I was wrong, it was about 1.5 Trillion/yr over present spending, an average of 3 Trillion a year (we spend about 1.5 trillion already to cover around half of residents, so that jives fairly well). Which is substantially less than 4 trillion/yr.

The fact remains, though, that DoD budgets, even with the bloated one we have right now, doesn't begin to cover the expenses accrued under the M4A proposals. And that also does not take into account the fact that purely medicare (without medicaid, CHIPS, Tricare, IHS etc) is responsible for more than half of the deficit we have right now (with social security making up the rest). FedGov runs a surplus without these mandatory programs.

But that is getting in the weeds a little bit. Point is, the entire DoD budget doesn't begin to cover M4A. There would need to be substantially more offset.

Oh, and the Mercatus Center study is a really poor one to use, since the author himself states that cost savings are unrealistic. It pretty much assumes that providers will take a 40% cut to reimbursement rates with no knock-on effects.

To be clear here, I'm not saying that M4A or universal healthcare is a bad thing. But I am saying that "stop buying bullets, buy bandages" isn't a realistic way to look at healthcare policy, or paying for universal care.

Last estimate is universal care in the US would cost about 4 Trillion 1.5 Trillion a year more than what we spend now on healthcare (which is substantial). You'd need 4.5 1.5 DoD budgets to cover that, and I ran out of fingers and toes counting how many space force budgets.

Bad take. Medicare is the 2nd most expensive line item in the federal budget, following closely social security.

Over half the US is covered under some form of government paid healthcare scheme (Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, Tricare, IHS etc.)