> (by any metric you care to track) healthcare systems of any industrialized nation That's certainly not true. Of course compared to pretty much every highly d

> (by any metric you care to track) healthcare systems of any industrialized nation That's certainly not true. Of course compared to pretty much every highly developed country if we factor in relative spending per capita you'd be right. But yeah, purely market/profit driven systems (with extremely poor and inefficient regulation) certainly don't work in certain sectors like healthcare. Also it depends on what do you mean by 'socialized medicine', if you're specifically talking about single payer, your point is only valid if you ignore all other countries which don't have single payer besides the US. The Swiss and (as far as I can tell) to a lesser Dutch healthcare systems are 'privatized' to a much higher degree than the one in US i.e. effectively fully, there are no Medicare/Medicaid equivalents there. Instead they are very strictly and relatively efficiently regulated. They pretty much have Obama/Romneycare++. If you mean something else than single-payer then the US system is arguably heavily 'socialized', both through insurance polling (just like in the countries I mentioned) and because the US government itself spends more on healthcare than most industrialized countries even relative to GDP. e.g. if we exclude all private spending (both individual and insurance) government health spending per capita in the US is significantly higher than in Britain and more than 2x higher than in Spain (and still significantly higher if adjusted by PPP GDP per capita) https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.GHED.PP.CD?locations=US-GB-ES https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.GHED.PP.CD?locat...