Why do you even argue against someone that doesn't think "insurance" should exist? Its a troll, not even most serious libertarian freaks are that idiotic. Our goal should be to make sure these freaks have no power.
OF COURSE single-payer means lower prices, the government has a shit ton of power in negotiating prices if they want to. They don't want to because they are corrupt, freaks like the above are only there to rationalize the theft. They need to be defeated politically.
The original argument wasn't against public healthcare per se, but against the US system in which it really is run as insurance, with multiple competing providers, who therefore don't have the power to negotiate down prices.
It's very easy to find examples of abuse in this system. For example, in modern "factory towns" around corporate campuses, somehow, routine dental maintenance costs exactly the maximum amount provided for this purpose by the employee health plan.
> If consumers actually directly paid the whole cost for health services, the prices charged would become far more regular.
Which is arguing against the very idea of insurance which distributes risk, its an absurd argument not even libertarians make. The problem for literarians/neoliberals is that we already have exactly the system they think should work great, it just doesn't, but they completely refuse to ever recognize that the reason it doesn't work is systemic and it will never be fixed by more literarianism/neoliberalism, we need to shove it. Whats needed is a single-payer, universal, zero(!!!)-private, public health care system.
Why insist on single payer? It's not even dominant in Europe, and it makes the whole thing a much harder sell politically, yet there are no clear evidence that single payer is superior to other public healthcare arrangements.
OF COURSE single-payer means lower prices, the government has a shit ton of power in negotiating prices if they want to. They don't want to because they are corrupt, freaks like the above are only there to rationalize the theft. They need to be defeated politically.