If the costs of socialized healthcare are astronomical then you are doing something wrong with it. In Western countries there are so many private components in healthcare that I can't recognize that as trully socialized, thererefore I can say that you didn't see trully socialized healthcare. (just as I didn't saw the completely capitalistic one)
Very true, but without an extremely high level of control over the system from an administrative standpoint combined with a nearly godlike understanding as to how the system operates and how it affects individuals within it, as well as comprehension of the true nature of treatments for the vast majority of ailments and of the absolute ideal and most up-to-date methods of how to implement them, it is very very difficult to keep socialized healthcare from growing into a financially vampiric behemoth without the checks and balances of the free market. (Or at least without being able to obtain on a regular basis information as to treatments and methodologies from countries that were able to retain their free market healthcare)
There is pressure from all sides at all times to pay higher wages, to hire more staff, to implement new remedies, to widen the scope of illnesses that are treatable, to widen the scope of what symptoms are considered illnesses (aka psychological/hypochondria/general stupidity), as well as to build more hospitals, etc. The desired quality of these institutions as well as sense of how much money the workers are perceived to be entitled to in this situation tend to be relative in a sense to the most highly paid private sector employees due to how highly the healthcare sector is regarded by the general public as well as by the government. In this situation, dubiously overpaid government staff begin to have complete control over the amount of money reportedly needed to sustain the system and if there is ever an error at any level that has been overlooked then it is nearly an impossible task to dismantle the entire system and have whatever error there was admitted and begin a system overhaul.
But to tell you the truth I think both extremes are better than the middle ground where it is inevitable that private components will suck out huge amount of tax money. In capitalism market and competency solve the issue and in socialism government and public are much more merged togather and government throught its domination organizes healthcare that does not cost much and provides fairly good quality in order to win simpathies and therefore make itself stabile. Middle way is clearly the worst option in my opinion.
This is probably true in some ways but sometimes that small amount of private influence is undoubtedly needed to influence the larger system into a correction of some kind. There are definitely all sorts of possibilities for corruption in this mixed set-up but again that could be chalked up to administrative oversights, laziness, or ignorance on the part of the government employees, which happen very very frequently because the public frequently loses the ability to gauge their competence.
Yeah this is temporary measure but here something can always come up and changes can be postponed because of that. We joined western association exactly because that is basically the only way that we brake horrible circles that are running the place to the ground. Also don't get me wrong but I am deliberately showing apsurds of my country that are comming from our past but the truth is that that my country today isn't that "black place" these days as it was 20 or so years back.
Yeah, I am glad your country is getting better. Mine unfortunately is getting worse...
I think that mods should move this into my twilight thread, since here that is quite a bit of drail.
If you desire, although I think this conversation benefits this thread greatly in some ways due to it being somewhat of a linchpin issue to the entire debate.