I want to jump back and move from a point a little bit earlier that I think sums up the way a lot of opponents of socialized health care think about the issue.
Ancien Régime said:
Nobody is advocating that people pay for police services. But what people on the Right advocate is that as much be left to the (so much more efficient it's ridiculous) private sector as possible, and let government provide only those the private sector can't or would have difficulty providing - defense, infrastructure, public safety and so forth.
The issue here is that health care is something that the private sector is having a lot of difficulty providing, and the reason can go back to a simple conflict of interest. In a US style health insurance system, the people who really control the average person's access to health care (the insurance companies) have it in their best interest to provide as little care as possible to people who are in bad health. Like, if you have a 90% chance of dying from a condition, and an expensive treatment can reduce it to 50%, the insurance company's obvious best interest is to fight providing you that treatment, and there are countless horror stories of them doing just that. The actual cost to pay for any non-minor treatment is completely ludicrous as well so if the insurance company doesn't pay for it your personal assets become a concern. How many people actually have hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for medical treatment out of pocket? Even if you're well off, that will totally wreck your financial future, but for most people it's just impossible.
That being said, it is true that the private sector will probably provide a higher quality of care for those able to pay the price than anything that a socialized system can ever offer, and I can't dispute that there is likely to be a systematic inverse relation between the quality of care and the breadth of coverage offered by the system. The current US approach, with the exception of the pretty limited Medicare and Medicaid, is one that leans toward quality over widespread coverage. Obama's proposals are pretty in-line with the Canadian system; he wants to maintain the private sector while expanding the public one. The idea, which no politician would own up to, is that a socialized system would provide acceptable care, but there would be a co-existing private system necessary for exceptional care (but that would be expensive to use). It probably sounds heartless, but I doubt we'll find better. I definitely support this style of system.
I should also point out that "government" already has a big hand in the medical industry. The whole prescription drug system uses restrictive government granted monopolies (patents) and restrictive laws governing drug markets (doctor prescriptions required, registered pharmacists required) to sharply limit the avenues through which patients can purchase the drugs. Like with the other case, this is a situation where power is put in the government's hands instead of the private sector's hands in order to obtain a trade-off. People are less likely to use inappropriate drugs, and drug companies make tons of money that could be prudently invested in research. The downside is a small curtailment of liberty and an enormous financial burden on people who depend on those drugs, especially the elderly (the AARP isn't kidding when they go on about prescription drugs; it really dominates the finances for a lot of old people). The government also forces hospitals to provide financially unsound services (admitting poor people to the emergency room), and it forces doctors to go through a lengthy process before they are allowed to practice. I've never seen a conservative person complain about these things, but the "private sector" in medicine is nothing at all like a typical free market; it's completely defined by very restrictive government regulations.
Of course, depending on your perspective, the results aren't bad either way. This is an issue that has a lot more than two sides to it, and there are good arguments for it all over the place. I think in terms of moving ahead practically, Obama's plan is the right plan for the times. It maintains a lot of our current advantages while minimizing some of our current disadvantages, and it works toward what I feel is a modern society's moral duty on the matter to ensure that no one is ever told they have to die because they don't have money.
