You wanna review the track record of market driven healthcare systems vs socialized medicine? Spoiler: the US has one of the worst (by any metric you care to track) healthcare systems of any industrialized nation. Just because someone else's shit is broken doesn't necessarily mean your shit is working.
> Spoiler: the US has one of the worst (by any metric you care to track) healthcare systems of any industrialized nation.
That "by any metric" is just plain wrong. There's several metrics by which the US healthcare system is among the best--in general, if the metric you are tracking is largely covering the success rates of medical procedures (sibling comment mentions 5-year cancer survival rates, for example), then the US generally scores high. If the metric you are tracking is instead covering general population health or things easily caught with preventative medicine, then the US scores abysmally in those metrics.
In other words, the US healthcare system actually turns out to be very good (if perhaps not on a per-cost metric)... but access to the good healthcare system is extremely poor. And that's kind of what you'd expect for a market-driven system: good healthcare if you can afford it, shit healthcare if you can't.
I care to track cancer 5-year survival rates and the number of new drugs introduced per year. By those metrics the US is at or near the top. The US healthcare system has plenty of flaws but it does some things quite well.
Tell that to the folks that are dying because they can't afford off-patent insulin. I know a young lady who passed away in her dorm room a couple years back because she'd been rationing, I could introduce you to her family, I'm sure they'd be delighted for your take on medical profiteering.
Socialized systems are subsidized by the US drug companies. Corporations pour billions of dollars into r&d and other countries end up making cheap generics of the final product, without having to do any of the research.
US Healthcare is expensive, but the quality is better than most other countries.
> Socialized systems are subsidized by the US drug companies. Corporations pour billions of dollars into r&d and other countries end up making cheap generics of the final product, without having to do any of the research.
The American pharma companies also don't do the research, a lot of it comes from scientific institutions funded by public money.
What pharma companies do is provide capital for drug trials which are absurdly expensive, they are more alike investment companies than actual research institutes...
> (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)
Socialism does not mean central planning of a whole economy. That was the Soviet model of communism, which doesn't work at all.
I feel that the USA's education system has indoctrinated students so deeply into the red scare that real terms have become meaningless to discuss political and economical systems with the larger American audience, the words simply don't mean the same, they mean what you've been indoctrinated to believe they mean.
> Socialism does not mean central planning of a whole economy
What other forms of semi-stable functional "socialism" are there?
> have become meaningless to discuss political and economical systems with the
Discussing hypothetical pseudo-utopian systems like "socialism" or "communism" isn't particularly meaningful either (from the economics perspective, not philosophical).
IMHO the problem with socialism is that it will pretty always be outcompeted by private ("capitalist") enterprises which can provide goods and services which are both higher quality and cheaper (yes by "underpaying" their workers but also they tend to be much more efficient). Therefore you can't really allow both in the system/country.
So realistically "socialism" can only exist if the state suppresses any alternatives using various degrees of coercion and force. Since no real competition and by extension dissent can exist (i.e. nobody has enough resources to challenge the state without significantly damaging their career/status/wellbeing) the state ends up becoming more and more oppressive/controlling and unavoidable corrupt. I'd love to see any empirical evidence disproving this but as far as I can tell historically that's what always ended up happening.
If cooperatives can survive and compete with private enterprises without excessive regulation and government coercion that limits and competition and leads to lower productivity that's great. As far as I can tell that's rarely (but probably occasionally) the case unless we're also including "guild" like organizations.
However I'm not sure cooperatives are strictly a "form" of socialism, they have been a part of capitalist societies since pretty much the very beginning. I guess it depends where we draw the lines between partnerships etc. and cooperatives, I guess hiring additional workers who don't have an equal stake/share in the enterprise or subcontracting any sort of labor (let's say on a significantly meaningful scale, but still very hard to avoid) would be it.
