Neither system is very good.
We need to stop using ideology as the only measure of a system and look at how it works.
The US system is great for those who have decent health insurance or good health, but a financial disaster otherwise. If you’ve been covered by employer insurance all your life, try buying private insurance when not covered. Only the very healthy can get it. If you cannot buy it, the cost of procedures to you can be up to 10 times the cost if an insurance company was paying.
The idea of having your health insurance provided by your employer is probably more idiotic than having it provided by the government. It is an artifact of wage controls in World War II.
The US spends far more per capita on health care than other countries.
On the good side, US health care is excellent. Those who compare mortality statistics with European countries fail to account for confounding factors that the US has far more than Europe – factors unrelated to the system itself.
Canadians routinely come here for superior, more available care. Our local Mayo Clinic has a full time staff of translators for foreigners.
The US system, because it does not have a monopoly buyer for medical care, is a major driving force in medical innovation. Create a monopoly buyer and where are the drug companies (for example) going to make enough profit to pay for their costs of developing new medications?
Anyone who thinks the US system is a free market one is fooling themselves. Anyone who thinks the free market will take care of the following problems is likewise wrong:
1) The displaced cost of those who choose not to buy insurance and then use expensive resources
2) The fate of those who cannot buy insurance due to finanical reasons, but need care
3) The FACT that many cannot buy insurance due to extreme pre-existing conditions limitations; and the fact that insurance companies must impose pre-existing conditions limitations or fail due to free-riders (you don’t buy insurance until you get cancer, for example).
3) The (required) provision of care to all comers, with the problem of who pays.
3) The pathetically low state of automation of the US medical system, due to the lack of mandatory standards
4) The power of big insurance monopsony buying, which forces hospitals (and other providers) to shift the real cost to those without those policies. The cost to the uninsured can be more than 10 times the cost to the insured (in my case, my insurance payed $480 on a bill that would have cost me, without insurance, $5000).
