(I pay out of pocket via a side business, not from my current employer.)
In what sense? What do you like about KP: the doctors, nurses, etc.? The billing department? Single-payer would not take the staff away. It would get rid of large swathes of the billing department that are pure waste.
Not everyone has had your positive experience with KP. We switched away due to lack of availability of certain specialists.
All that money is overhead that can be removed from the costs if health care didn't have to funnel through a private company taking profits from it.
https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/hospitals/kaiser-permanente...
Certainly not the salaries to actual health professionals (doctors, nurses, techs, etc).
When you see a doctor for 10 minutes and get billed $400, the vast majority of that money goes all the layers who are extracting their slice of profit from it, only a small bit goes to the doctor.
The us has the most expensive drug approval process in the world making any drug that goes to market needing high prices to exist. Around 10% of NH spending here.SP does not fix this.
Hospitals receive large gov funding, regulatory protection that includes the inability to build or run new or for-profit hospitals, and with the constant moral hazard of running hospitals in the red and getting bailed out. Almost all hospitals are non-profit. About 40% of NH spending. SP makes this even worse by eliminating forever the risk of bankrupcy.
Maybe it would be a good idea to lean on the better insurance companies (are there more than kaiser?) to administer.
Personally I think there needs to be stronger regulation so that they can still make some profit (not obscene) for incentive to get more efficient, while regulating they can't take that profit at the expense of patients & access to care.