It's the same story with everything. We can run a car on water. Air, even. Oh wait, no we can't. The oil industry says so...

Exactly lobbying is so out of control in the government its in the same way as piracy is in the internet

This completely applies in the US, and I can't imagine it's too much different elsewhere. Even Canadian friends will admit that seeing a specialist is a huge deal that takes months and requires lots of paperwork. When my sibling got a serious illness, being able to see a specialist quickly (I think it was a week or two) meant my sibling could get the meds needed then and not later. If we'd had to wait longer or try to convince people that we really did need a specialist, it would have been a different story.

There's also the fact that Britain is backing away from the NHS, medial tourism from nationalized healthcare European countries for basic stuff (not just cosmetic surgery, but apparently dentistry, even). Nationalized healthcare isn't as great a thing as a lot of people think.

I've dealt with a lot of public systems (school, unemployment benefits, and healthcare) and I just don't think it's a good idea for the US. In a different culture, or in a place where people were a lot closer to the physical average, it might work better. But the US is a lot bigger and more diverse than the places that have tried to nationalize healthcare in a serious way, and I don't think it would work. Especially given that Britain and other European countries are gently backing away from it in light of debt problems.

In France they have one of the best health care system in the world if not the best.
(No wonder the they have the longest life span there...)

But taxes are pretty high also, so it evens out.

Compared to it, health care system in U.S.A is pretty much ... useless.

have you ever used the US healthcare system? I find it complicated, but definitely not useless. If you aren't used to it, though, it's pretty hard to navigate.

Here in Spain we have an extensive NHS, that covers pretty much everything, including sex change operations (a thing that's really controversial lately here).
In fact, our goverment it's trying to cut the tourism that comes here to benefit from it, as it seems that we recieve a lot of people that comes with the intention of using several tricks to benefit from it, even if it's supposed to be resident-only.

Probably European citizens because of the free European healthcare. In Portugal it's very similar to the British one, and mainly it works good. The problem is now with the European crisis that these Budgets had started to being reduced and that will probably decrease the quality of the public healthcare versus the private.

Here's some statistics from the OECD ... the graphs are a bit random, but you can get the raw data if you search around the OECD page: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/24/8/49084488.pdf

Particularly page 44, re cost per capita is important, imo. There's not necessarily that much of a performance difference between private and publicly funded healthcare, but state funded health care in Europe seems to be a lot more cost effective than the US model. [And is that really that much of a surprise? Non-profit vs. profit orientation; the latter always will require more money for the same service.] Page 45 suggests that the state investment is the same in the US (roughly) than in Europe - but it's the private households that make up that huge difference.

When someone calls it free, just remember TANSTAAFL. It goes against the laws of thermodynamics. The less conversion processes, the better IMO, and I consider politicians to be a particularly lossy step in the conversion. Especially ones a thousand miles away. I could be wrong, but it just seems like there are more hidden costs when publicly funding. I workded at a non-profit organization that had rate-of-return regulation. It seemed very inefficient to me and the employees would often say later amongst themselves "What are they going to do, get service somewhere else? Ha!" when confronted by a disgruntled customer about the quality of service.

That's the same self fulfilling prophecy that the right always trots out to justify leaving things in the hands of the private sector. It works well because their politicians do whatever they need to do to bugger it all up.

I sometimes wonder whatever happened to the notion that the US can do pretty much anything we set our minds to. We're the same country that put a man on the moon before the Soviets and created the only successful shuttle program in the world and yet we "can't" do these things which many other countries were able to do. Seems fishy to me.

Here in China there is basically no health insurance public or private. There are a small number of health insurance plans available for foreigners, but they're quite expensive and I'd rather just pay out of pocket. If I end up with anything too severe I'll be evacuated back to the US for my health insurer there to cover as I wouldn't want to get emergency surgery or ICU care here.

Maybe so. But nearly anywhere I lived (Belgium, Germany, Sweden, UK) that had a National Health Service scrutiny on these organisations was very tight. Not saying that all non-profits are equally efficient, and that there's no waste in a national health system, but - in the case of health systems there is a lot of pressure to achieve that. At least OECD statistics referenced above seem to suggest so. I'd guess most NHS' are more efficient than many other government organised provisions.

Also - one important thing with health care is prevention. The early intervention that prevents later, much heavier costs. It'd be interesting to see how frequently people have check ups with doctors in comparison between state funded and privately funded systems.

Korea has a very effective public medical insurance program but no NHS as far as I could tell. What happens is, there is no sharp increase in tax, people go to the hospital every single time they feel queasy or catch a cold, and the cost of diagnosis comes up to like $4. They don't have humongous wait times because they can go to any private clinic they want -- you can take a quick 20 min. from your lunch break and get your checkup done if there aren't a lot of people in line. Then you take the prescription and go to the pharmacy and pay $5 for your meds because generics abound and the insurance covers 50%. I'm guessing that the prices these clinics can charge you is also tightly regulated so that no doctor can really overcharge the insurance program. The most lovely part was, I was backed up on payments for a year once, and they still gave me coverage until I paid up. Good deals.

Not qualifying for Medicare/Medicaid, I have no idea how the U.S. system works atm. I know it sure sucks not to have medical insurance, though, because each doctor's visit is costing $100 for a 10-minute checkup.

The US healthcare system works great for:
1) those who are actually covered by it (not to be confused to somehow include those who can't afford it or can afford it but have the ill luck to have themselves or a loved one come down with something that gets them stonewalled by insurance)
... and pretty much no one else.

The problem is that socialized medicine can mean longer waits and less impressive care for those upper middle-class people with really good insurance right now, or those in jobs that make less but have kick-ass benefits. Those people don't want to lower their standard of care to help others, because fuck helping others.