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(I apologize for this being rambling and rant-like, nothing personal is intended)
Historically, societies have advanced by producing surpluses of "things of value" which get traded outside the society rather than remaining inside society where the surplus depresses prices and hence incentive to produce surplus. Trade with other societies brings wealth back into the society where it circulates, turning the wheels of the domestic economy as it moves toward concentration in the wealthy class (where according to capitalist mythology it results in a surplus whose value can only be maintained by reinvestment, resulting in development and production of new products and greater capacity all of which is supposed create jobs for wage slaves. Being that investing in developing nations is so attractive it seems more unlikely than ever that the rich folks money will trickle into domestic jobs. But this digresses).
Even assuming that surplus healthcare capacity exists within the US, our healthcare is already so expensive that it is causing Americans to leave the country in search of healtcare in India, Mexico, and Brazil. How many foreign nationals will be attracted to the US for healthcare? Some surely who will seek out places like the Mayo Clinic, The John's Hopkins, etc., but I submit not enough to float the economy.
A couple dozen hours seriously engaged in the US healthcare system following routine outpatient surgery, say a fractured ankle that requires surgerical pins etc, and the medical and rehabilitation follow-up can cost the equivalent of half an average working class person's annual income. Truly serious hospital stays, say following tumor removal or organ transplant are simply so expensive as to be bankrupting for even middleclass households unless the cost is covered by insurance. But even with insurance, the insurance company has to cough up real dollars to the care providers. To make a healthcare system support the entire economy you simply have to spend more on healthcare per person than the jobs that currently exist can support. And re-direction of capital into healthcare would simply wreck a whole hell of a lot of jobs that are still providing dollars to keep health insurers profitable.
How are you gonna sustain an economy that depends on stripping families of their assets, or strips insurance companies of the assets they use to generate income that, even if only in part, is used to generate pay-outs to healthcare? Are you looking for the government to just print money and hand it over to cover healthcare costs? That would simply exacerbate the trade imbalance because our dollars will end up devalued. Every way I look at it a healthcare based economy threatens to impoverish society. It doesn't seem to me to be any more possible to support an advanced society simply on healthcare than it is to have an advanced society based simply upon McJobs. There would be an inevitable down-sizing of standards of living.
I could be completely old-school and ignorant of some new economic theory, but it seems to me that a positive balance of international trade is required to grow an entire nation, and that a balance of trade is the minimum necessary to maintain a society. Healthcare simply can't do that for the US. Insurance companies can try to create a positive balance in capital flow through investments, but they are off-shoring their HQ's and their cash to avoid taxes. Moreover, without places to invest that cash in the US that can generate increased value, the US the insurance companies would be forced to invest OUTSIDE the US. Consequently, money to keep up all the things that maintain, forget about advancing, society would go elsewhere in the world. The US can't sustain itself under that. We end up with decay, that decay becomes an ever more crushing weight.
It seems to me that growing an economy depends upon taking resources and modifying them into something more valuable than existed at the start, and selling the value added thing to capture the change in value. The dominant pattern in Healthcare is returning a person to health (and that is both attractive, good, and important) but, typically it doesn't result in a person who is more valuable than they were before they got sick or injured (notwithstanding that in some cases corrective surgeries certainly do).
I don't see how a healthcare based society could maintain let alone grow an entire national economy anymore than could a society based on auto-repair (even though auto-repair is very useful and important to contemporary US society).
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