>>>Regardless of whether this plan is provided by a private or public entity, the forced purchase of a product goes against the very essence of private property rights.
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>Here is a closed question for you: how will you solve the $40T (and growing) Medicare hole? I'm asking you how to fix the problem, not the blame. Remember that Medicare recipients are a significant and growing electorate that is unlikely to be so offended by "forced" contributions from people like you to cover the $40T.

A phased out appraoch.
Those currently receiving benefits may remain or choose to opt out taking a lump sum payment equal to what they're due (in today's dollars, if they lived to the present average life expectancy) + interest for those who had contributed more than this amount during their lifetime.
Those not currently receiving benefits will have the choice based on a sliding age scale to take a percentage of the same deal as above, say 2% less for each year under 65. Thus those who are currently 15 or younger will never know any part of the program.

Concurrently, numerous other public programs which skew the market through payments must be eliminated either through increased privitization or vouchers.

In addition, the regulatory climate must be made dramatically less restrictive, starting with the repeal of the PPACA, removal of the interstate insurance ban, implement a fast-track FDA approval process and we need to dismantle the employer-centric health insurance model.

Without a massive deregulation and removal of public funding, simply reforming Medicare alone will have little effect.

>As for public versus private: consider that 70% of US hospitals are not-for-profit, not counting VA or state-owned facilities. Generally these have religious affiliation with socialistic tendencies and a policy of reinvestment rather than scooping-out for dividends. Even so, and despite 50M US residents having minimal access to care, your healthcare costs are still by far the highest per capita and as a percentage of GDP except for East Timor- and STILL you end up with a $40T deficit. Forget knocking holes in whatever anybody else says: can the $ be redistributed to fend off the pending disaster and if so, how? Or what other real-life solution can you suggest, since anti-government sloganeering obviously won't solve the issue and the insurers will fight any "forced" contributions from themselves even though their own prices are significantly more than the Medicare levy. Perhaps you can pass Medicare in its current state over to the private insurers to fix. ;-)

The government is so tightly wrapped in our health care industries (just like a spreading cancer) that we need to make broad sweeping cuts just to see what the market underneath looks like and we need to do it quickly before it kills the host (I've seen numbers much higher that $40T). Allowing interstate insurance competition and de-linking the employer provided model will free millions from the need to stay in their present jobs just for health insurance. Those two alone will greatly re-distribute the labor force more efficiently by removing what many view as a critical consideration in searching for employment and freeing capital in the companies to more efficiently deploy. However, without the removal of the public-payment system as well, these gains will be severly limited.

Free makerts expand choices, lower costs and encourage development. Why anyone seems to think that health care is special is beyond reason to me. We can look at medical sub-industries (lasic, plastic, CPAP, etc) for examples.