Agree that this would be a better system on average. Especially if combined with better baseline education about how to manage basic medical problems at home. Also agree it will never happen because of too many vested interests and too much money in the current system.
But any thoughts on how your system would handle, eg, sicklers and lupus-ers and other young and chronically ill people who couldn't afford the massive care needed to keep them healthy out of pocket? If you say "those people can be publicly funded", how does one decide who gets funded and avoid perpetuating regulatory capture and mission creep in that system?
I don't have a good answer for your very legitimate question / constructive criticism.
I mentioned above that we pay lawyers, accountants, engineers, prostitutues, etc. Why can't we do that for medicine?
One reason is that it is possible in life to never have the need to hire a lawyer, accountant, an engineer, or a prostitute. Or if you do - you might only need them once or twice. So if it costs you $3-5K to get any one of those, and you do it a few times in your life, well then you understand how expensive it is and modify your life as much as possible to try to avoid needing them. As a result you try live a lawful life, minimize your economic complexities to need an accountant, buy a reputable car and house to avoid needing a regular engineer, and finding a partner to wham-bam without having to pay him/her - perhaps in the form of marriage or just a partner with benefits.
However It is probably unlikely, if not impossible, to live your entire life without needing a doctor. You might be able to for the first 40-60 years, but people these days live to be 80 years old, the body slowly breaks down and organs slowly stop working. Unless you are willing to let nature take it's course, you will need help to keep yourself alive. So hey, if you are willing to die from an MI at 52 yrs, old, or not get treated and have severe heart failure and a miserable life for the next 3-4 years, and willing to sit at home hypoxic and in respiratory distress and feeling like you are going to die, want to die, and die like that....then I'm for that. But most people are going to say "s%@t...my chest really hurts and there is a hospital close by...so let them fix me and I'll live another 25 years of living."
So unlike an accountant or lawyer, you are probably going to need a physician in your life many times. Now the next question is who should pay for it? I still think in that situation that you should pay for your own doctor. I think it's fine to get catastrophic "real" insurance. I know there are some countries (and I think Malaysia or the Phillipines are one) where the government "gives" or deposits money into a federal health care fund for you to use only on health care. But you don't have to use it, and you can bequeath it to your children. So some older adults near the end of their life won't use their health care and die sooner than they should, and give their money to their children. But what happens in those countries if you are young and exhaust your supply of money? Do they let you rot and die in the street? Or do you stay in the hospital and the govt picks up the tab until are healthy enough to be discharged? I don't know.
And my desire to have people pay for more of their health care is problematic for the reasons you stated above. I don't know what to do about those people with chronic disease. Frankly, probably the right thing to do on a national / international level, for the sake of our world and to live in a sustainable world at peace with nature, is to let them die. If a lion is born with an autoimmune disease, it dies. If a fly is born without a wing, it dies. It a bird develops marfans and has an aortic dissection, it dies. We feel though that everybody single person has the right to life. And that can be taken to an extreme too. We feel that not only are people allowed to live, but if it takes 4
other people FULL TIME to care for them their entire life, then that's legitimate. It's kind of a ridiculous position, isn't it?
There are about 1.4M wildebeest in the world. They all roam free. Imagine if 400,000 of them stay in one place, protect, and take care of 100,000 infirmed and physically disabled wildebeest? And the other 1M go out and roam free?
So I don't have a good answer for those sicklers and lupus and chronic pain patients. My answer is not a popular one.