I don’t know about Kos or Hamsher, but a lot of single-payer advocates’ argument is based on the lack of value added by insurance companies. Sure, someone needs to hold monies and disburse them appropriately, and I doubt American medicine will ever be without a bureaucracy to determine what gets paid and what gets denied, but remember that Medicare does this with dramatically lower overhead than private insurers. The difference in overhead appears to be profit, inefficiency, and more aggressive efforts to deny insureds access to the money they paid into the system.

So the government already does what insurers do, but arguably does it better and cheaper. It doesn’t make sense to send public dollars to that sort of corporation, unless one wants to hew to the status quo for hewing’s sake, or perhaps to foster those corporations’ economic health. The government could probably do what drug companies or medical device companies do as well, but it’s much more of a stretch.

As to your first point, it may just be me, but I think it’s more reasonable to take the political risk of raising revenue if one’s going to do something good with the money. For that reason, the political downside of taking peoples’ money for a single payer health care program would be more palatable than doing so for a program that turns around and gives that money to insurers. The political appearance might also be more benign, as it looks less like a corporate bailout.

That being said, we’ve never been allowed to consider a single payer program, and arguably had a robust public option on the table for only a short time. Thus, while I believe I understand the rationale for the first argument, I agree with you that in the end it’s not a compelling reason change one’s mind about a mandate.