Are you saying healthcare should be handled by the government because healthcare is not always profitable?
This goes to a major complaint I have about the way we seem to be approaching health care in the United States: it's always an "either/or" proposition. Either the entirety of 1/6th of the economy in the United States can be handled by free markets, or the entirety cannot. There is never any consideration that perhaps one part isn't profitable under the current rules and needs a rule tweak, or that a small part doesn't work under free market rules and should be socialized but the rest should use free market rules.
Take, for example, discussions about the unprofitability of Emergency Room operations. I've seen the fact that hospitals who run an ER are required to treat anyone--and thus wind up treating the uninsured for minor ailments as a suggestion that the entire health care system is broken and so we need single payer.
But does anyone in the debate consider the possibility that ER visits only represent a very small percentage of the overall costs to the health care system? Does anyone consider the possibility of perhaps just socializing the costs for ER visits--by using taxpayer dollars to implicitly insure the uninsured who use an ER, while leaving the rest of the system alone?
Or take the fact that it is profitable for insurance companies to dump high-expense patients who run up large insurance-paid health care bills due to things like cancer. "Oh, we must switch to single payer, otherwise insurance companies will dump expensive patients and leave them to die." (Never mind that in Great Britain, they are implicitly dumping expensive older patients by pushing them onto the Liverpool Care Pathway without their consent. Bean counters are bean counters regardless of if they work for the government or for private corporations.)
But did anyone consider the possibility of the government backstopping insurance companies for high-expense patients, by (for example) putting a cap on the amount of money an insurance company must pay out in the lifetime of an individual (call it $1 million)--then when you hit that cap, the money beyond that cap comes from the government, filtered through the insurance company? That is, we socialize costs for expensive patients, while privatizing costs below the cap.
Ohhhhh, no. It's "either/or." Because we're too stupid to think of anything more subtle than reshaping the entire industry to fit either in the mould of Ayn Rand or in the mould of Karl Marx.