> Your post also makes the weird assumption that supplies (medication, medical devices, dressings etc, beds and sheets and food and everything) is all also owne

> Your post also makes the weird assumption that supplies (medication, medical devices, dressings etc, beds and sheets and food and everything) is all also owned and provided by the government. They are not, they are made and sold by private companies to other companies - some of those are private companies, some of them are foundation trusts. There is a matter of degree involved. The more the healthcare market is socialized, the more prices will be distorted. The goods you listed may still have rational prices, still being provided by the market, but the prices of services will be distorted since there's no actual trade involved (hence no price signals) so it has to be centrally planned. And yes of course health provision is complex, which is exactly why the prices cannot be rationally decided by central planners. They simply don't have the necessary information to make rational decisions that depend on the millions upon millions of price signals that are disseminated on a daily basis in a distributed fashion in real markets. A good illustration of this is that communist planners in the Soviet Union had to rely on world prices (i.e. capitalist world prices) as guidelines for the pricing and allocation of resources.