There are a small group of Americans who are "uninsurable", who private insurance companies refuse to offer coverage to (or will only do so at unreasonably high prices). This is my idea to solve the problem: Set up a government-run insurance program to provide insurance to them. The insurance costs would be set at a substantial percentage higher (maybe 30 percent) than the cost of any standard normal health insurance, but at least it would be there, and the costs of insurance could be partially subsidized, if need be. This would avoid creating competition with the private sector, because we'd only be talking about a small segment of the population insurance companies generally do not want to provide to anyway, and the prices would be higher than in the private sector, so it wouldn't be like people would want to rush into this alternative plan, not unless they had virtually no other options. Since this would be a government-run program, they could offer different tiers of coverage, some of it might not cover everything the person might need, but it would be a great opportunity to cut costs by rationing care, where government would get to decide how that care would be rationed (something that would be too problematic to do from the private sector). Currently there are all sorts of regulations on private health insurance providers preventing them from offering lower tiers of coverage.
