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Just because some other countries have these sorts of systems doesn't mean they necessarily work. See also, socialized medicine for a have/work example. For all the complaints about insurance companies and HMOs, you'll still get too see the doctor earlier and your operation sooner in the US. Unless you're indigent, in which case you end up with socialized medicine: medicare/medicaid. Thanks to a number of other factors, primarily diet, you won't live any longer here though, but I digress. >>
First correction: Medicare, Medicaid, and SCHIP are hardly "socialized medicine." They are health insurance plans that use the same doctors as private insurance and that just happen to be paid for out of Federal and state budgets (from dollars collected through taxes). And most all persons with Medicare or Medicaid have fee-for-service plans and aren't under managed care... fee-for-service is about as far from "socialized" medicine as you can get (in that only the incentive/disincentive of copayments act to ration care in any way).
Interesting note about the effect of Medicare: a newborn in the U.S. has a lower expected lifespan than a newborn in almost any other Western country. If you look at every decade of life (age 10, 20, etc.) the numbers are the same until you look at senior citizens. If you make it to age 70, you will live longer in the U.S. than in any other Western country.
Pharmaceuticals and hospitals love these so-called "socialized" programs because the create an artificially high demand for health care services that have low marginal value. I mean, in this country it is not uncommon for a person to spend half their life savings on health care in the last six months of life... and to what end? Big Medicine loves having consumers with Medicare who don't care about the price; their only complaint is that they want higher and higher reimbursement for their services!
You rightly mention the fact that Americans have lower life expectancy than persons in other countries. Much of it *is* diet, and many in public health fields have proposed that we shouldn't spend so much on "heroic" techniques and should spend more to educate Americans on eating better, not smoking, exercising, etc.
A very important other factor is the issue that, quite frankly, all our "modern medical miracles" don't add up to much in terms of overall longevity. The germ theory in the 1920s did more for improving lifespan than almost anything else in the past two centuries. There have been some influential articles in health policy literature about the feedback loop caused by R&D, in which medical device companies and pharms have incentives to create very expensive treatments with low marginal efficacy because someone with insurance is buying the service, and hey, whadda they care if it's $1,000 or $100,000?
Conservatives love free markets and hate government "intervention" in things like health care, but what we're stuck with instead is a system where patients and physicians together make health care consumption decisions that someone else (their employer) has to pay for. That doesn't strike me as a very good "market oriented" solution.
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