Health insurance from a private company is still a collectivist action.
No, it isn't.
Those companies require your collective funds to do the payouts for the people that actually do use their cover, and if you're not getting sick, then you're paying more than your fair share in the first place.
There is no "fair share" because risk is pooled. You could only have a share, if you knew exactly how many claims there would be, in which case, it would not be insurance, it would be prepayment.
Governments use the term insurance, for funds that do not actually provide insurance. Insurance is a form of risk mitigation. Not a collective system of service or good provision.
One might say it's socialism by proxy, just better hidden, because there are certain private individuals getting amazingly rich and fat off it... just like the leaders of a corrupted socialist/communist society.
But it is not socialism by proxy (it is corporatism). There is nothing wrong with getting rich off something. What is wrong, is when you get rich by rent seeking (limiting competition through regulatory advantage or licensing) in order to maintain higher than market prices.
What I find amazing is how few people, particularly on here, seem at all willing to even consider the shade of grey: a hybrid system - whereby if one has private health insurance, they get a rebate on their tax that's about the same as what you'd pay into the national system in the first place (we have that here... amazingly, private health insurance premiums went up by almost the exact amount the rebate was worth about a month after the legislation was enacted).
It doesn't just have to be private/public cover
There is an Austrian Economics expression, taken from Mises.
"The issue is always the same, the government or the market. There is no third solution."
In other words, hybrid systems are for all intents and purposes, public options, as they undermine private options.
"Health insurance" can only be assessed as collective risk pooling, where there is a possibility no claims will be made. I have expressed this many times at WF already. You don't insure your car against tire wear, because that is an expected expense. Likewise, you wouldn't insure the house of a pyromaniac against fire, why would you insure a woman trying to start a family against the costs of getting pregnant?
You can't insure the likely or predictable. That is not the function of insurance. That is prepayment. And when the costs are known, the premiums of a prepayment plan, must rise to equal known costs + management fees (overhead). Which means prepayment, is actually overpayment.
So what some people want, is a public health pool. Not insurance, a health pool. The problem is, not everyone can pay, and not everyone needs the pool to the same degree.
Right now, there is nothing to stop do-gooders and bleeding hearts from paying for medicine for their fellow citizens via charity. What a public option is, is using the power of democracy aka political power, to force other people to give up their property for your cause.
You don't give. You force other people to give and you claim the moral benevolence for it.
Look how wonderful I am, I have given away someone elses money!
The way to create better health care for more people, is to lower barriers to entry, and allow maximum competition. The more competition, the more options, the more advancement, the lower the costs, the more opportunities there will be.
As long as competition remains restrained, and the state starts handing out care without fully paying for it, shortages must occur. That means waiting lists.
More care must be paid for (nothing in life is free). To make more care affordable, competition and accountability to the customer (patient) is necessary.
It's really as simple as that.