The uninsured middle class

Here is a series of stories on the effects of being uninsured for the middle class (NY Times, 5/5).
What bothers me is that there is just so much unwillingness to embrace a single-payer system run by the government in this country. I respect choice, but I feel that Americans opposed to national healthcare are either ignorant of the public health superiority of these systems in many other developed countries or so stubbornly wedded to the principle of individual freedom that it trumps any good judgment.

And even if you do want to let people choose, I don't hear many free-market libertarians or conservatives trumpeting proposals that would ensure everyone could get affordable coverage. The woman in the story had a history of cancer; her premiums amounted to 27K a year, with a 5K deductible. You gotta be bringing in a lot more than a typical middle-class income (47K) to pay for that. So we have choice in our system. In principle. In reality, asking someone to pay 30-50% of their pretax earnings is not giving them a choice at all.

The stupid thing is this: if she gets really sick or injured and ends up in the ER, her care will come out of the public trough anyway, and the chances of that happening are increased by the fact that she can't afford to take the full dose of her chemotherapy meds, which cost several hundred dollars a month.

Although to be honest, a national healthcare system would probably only address a few of the reasons why costs have sky-rocketed, namely by reducing administrative overhead and the massive expenses incurred when an uninsured person arrives in the ER for an illness that could have been treated or even prevented much more cheaply by a primary care doctor.