The strongest argument for national health care.

This (from Kevein Drum) looks like the strongest economic argument for a national health care system:

"Matt Yglesias on one of the upsides of a national health care plan:

There seems to me to be decent evidence that labor market flexibility leads to employment growth. It also seems clear that America's health care system generates substantial labor market rigidities as people with medical histories need to maintain a seamless web of insured-ness in order to remain insurable. [The] economic costs here seem potentially quite large, but obviously you'd need some really smart people to take a look at it.

I don't know the size of this effect either, but I certainly know of people who are basically stuck in their jobs forever because they have an expensive, chronic condition that wouldn't be covered during their first year at a new job. Policies vary, but it's not uncommon for pre-existing conditions to get limited (or no) coverage during an initial period under a new group health plan. As for taking a year off to go to school, or leaving to start a new business, you can just forget it if you have a chronic condition that's too expensive to risk losing coverage for."

This labor mobility is in addition to the greater freedom for business to focus managerial efforts on their own business, rather than the peripherals of employee health care.

Ask GM, Ford, and the Japanese firms who prefer to locate in Canada rather than the U.S. because in Canada the costs of health care are standard for every firm. Managerial time and effort is a rare commodity, and should be focused on the business rather than such unrelated items as negotiating with health insurance companies and trying to supervise health insurance contracts.

Is one reason a lot of firms fight universal health care because they will have to work harder to keep employees? Sort of like the way the electric utilities, mobile (and regular) phone companies and cable TV demand two year contracts so that a customer can't easily switch to a better offer?

And I'll disagree with Kevin. The current U.S. system wastes a minimum of 25% of every health care dollar in unnecessary overhead. Universal health care should easily be able to provide better general health care at sharply lower overall cost. Nearly 40 other countries provide total coverage at sharply lower costs per patient and get better overall results than the U.S. does.