alt Hacker NewsUniversal Health Coverage has a lot of other benefits:
1. It detaches health insurance from the employment market. This means those minimum wage walmart jobs just became more feasible, or any low end job really, since their is no pressure to provide "benefits" anymore. This would seriously lubricate the labor market, because the friction to providing, taking, and changing a job is reduced.
2. It ends a bias for group plans. If you are poor or are a trades worker and need to buy insurance outside of a group plan, you are going to be in an expensive high risk pool.
3. Its a benefit we can fund socially with taxes that will immediately have a positive impact on lower income workers, as well as poorer regions of the country (e.g. red states).
As a Canadian, I would caution against the kind of universal health plan we have. But yes I agree there should be some kind of public healthcare. Perhaps more as a government owned hospitals and clinics alongside the private ones rather than the fully public system we have here which comes with its own host of problems.
I think it's easy to shout free healthcare as a slogan but I think the important bit is how it's implemented.