Tim Worstall asks

…is a single payer system actually any cheaper, once the deadweight costs of…taxes are taken into account?

More here, this man would warm the heart of Doug Gibbs.  I recall learning that deadweight losses from taxation are about 20 percent of revenue raised, which is just about the size of overhead costs for the private insurance industry.  Don’t ignore this sentence either:

The French system, the one that is generally rated as being number 1 globally, is neither single payer nor single provider.