Yes, and private health insurance companies have profits so huge that they're pulling out of the insurance markets left and right and saying "sorry, we're just not interested in this business anymore!" Arizona's had it worst – many places there are on their last insurer – but that's just a taste of the phenomenon.
The premium hikes are paying for the treatment of the "uninsurable" and chronically ill. Even the profitable for-profit insurers are only running margins of 3%, maybe 4% in a good year. You could turn them all nonprofit and it wouldn't really help premiums. (And people tried! Look at the health-care co-op collapses in Colorado, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, New York, Nevada and Tennessee, and Oregon, as well!)
If we want to compare apples to apples, national healthcare doesn't work in Europe. It works in a variety of individual countries within Europe, some of which are imperiled. (And Canada has a population a tenth the size of the US.) Some of those countries have culturally homogenous well-educated populations smaller than the United States illegal immigrant population, so there's a demographic difference. That said...
Euro health care, writ large, works in the sense that "this is a substantial tax on our national incomes and possibly contributes to an economy which continues to suffer low growth rates and youth unemployment rates regularly in excess of 25% – and given the Euro crisis on top of that there may be some ugly cuts in the future, especially in places that aren't Germany." (Canada's health care at least has less of that problem.)
These national health care systems generally deal with cost control for the chronically ill and the elderly by rationing care through waiting lists for various operations... or, in the case of the Netherlands, by building a culture which pushes the elderly into assisted suicide.
(This is as opposed to the US who has historically dealt with them by making them pay for their own care, but has recently switched to dealing with them by hiking everyone's health care premiums to the point of unaffordability.)
Don't think I'm pitching solutions here!! I've just got buckets of cynicism for everyone!
> Some of those countries have culturally homogenous well-educated populations smaller than the United States illegal immigrant population, so there's a demographic difference.
Dogwhistle for "can't have nice things because blacks". Notwithstanding the relative homogeneity of their populations (the US is well down the list BTW), what difference should it make?
> Dogwhistle for "can't have nice things because blacks"
Eh. To constrain it deliberately to white people, think "established prosperous modern family, maybe WASPs or atheists, living in the Washington, D.C. suburbs with two stable incomes, commute on the Metro" vs, oh, "army veteran in a community in rural Appalachia which is reeling from the end of coal mining and wreaked by both prescription painkiller abuse and obesity, heavy smoker... local no-name church is the main community center ... considering a job driving a truck."
"Inner city African-American community" or not is but a small portion of this class of differences. Copenhagen vs Aeroskobing is a smaller gap than New York City vs Beards Fork, WV.
The premium hikes are paying for the treatment of the "uninsurable" and chronically ill. Even the profitable for-profit insurers are only running margins of 3%, maybe 4% in a good year. You could turn them all nonprofit and it wouldn't really help premiums. (And people tried! Look at the health-care co-op collapses in Colorado, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, New York, Nevada and Tennessee, and Oregon, as well!)