my healthcare idea

[Minimalist]

Your idea is universal single payer healthcare for the basics with the option to opt out and pay for a different plan if you have the desire and money do to so.

This is not your idea, its the Canadian health care system with the flawed idea of allowing people to opt out. It's the "all in" nature of universal insurance that allows it to be more efficient. To make your plan better, just change the provision allowing the opt out to one that allows the purchase of additional coverage on top of the basic plan without opting out of the universal system.
Now, your back to the Canadian system which the clownservatives will never accept for purely ideological reasons. They don't care that it costs less. They don't care that outcomes are better. All they care about is that some people who are not contributing taxes will get coverage and they will not abide this. They are in favor of cutting off their noses to spite their faces and are proud of it for the sole reason that it maintains ideological purity.

In effect, that's Medicare.  Medicare is not perfect.  It covers about 80% of the cost leaving room for so-called Gap Insurance which are over-priced private insurance plans designed to pay the portion that Medicare does not cover. 

Still Medicare is infinitely superior to what most people get and Medicare's model - only insuring older and thus probably sicker people - assures that it will always cost a lot.  If you allow/compel younger people to join it would go a long way to reducing the actuarial problems of the Medicare system that the fucking republicunts are always whining about.

[Crunchy]

Your idea is universal single payer healthcare for the basics with the option to opt out and pay for a different plan if you have the desire and money do to so.

This is not your idea, its the Canadian health care system with the flawed idea of allowing people to opt out. It's the "all in" nature of universal insurance that allows it to be more efficient. To make your plan better, just change the provision allowing the opt out to one that allows the purchase of additional coverage on top of the basic plan without opting out of the universal system.
Now, your back to the Canadian system which the clownservatives will never accept for purely ideological reasons. They don't care that it costs less. They don't care that outcomes are better. All they care about is that some people who are not contributing taxes will get coverage and they will not abide this. They are in favor of cutting off their noses to spite their faces and are proud of it for the sole reason that it maintains ideological purity.

I certainly wouldn't apply that analysis to all conservatives, but my experience being formerly part of such circles, is that ideological purity ranks high on the short list of primary motivators.  "What works" barely apparently makes the list, if at all, with such people.

We could learn a lot from our northern neighbor.

It's a curious thing that conservatives, who prided themselves on common sense, and complain that liberals are far too Utopian and impractical have become so incredibly idealistic that they simply refuse to acknowledge the overwhelming empirical evidence concerning health insurance costs and instead have adopted a Utopian view of "free markets".  They have become what they most complained about.