Basically my friend is trying to check out which countries is cheaper right now, basically what he said is the difference is not big but in US the service is a bit better.

I will imagine that is the future of any nationalized health care. Initially it is free under a huge tax burden, and later will go bankrupt and need to be charged, and because it is under no competition pressure, the service will be worse.

As you said above, government is “fundamentally incapable of actually exercising meaningful regulation over most industries”, so increase government is not the real solution. Good thing is the marriage of money and power in a democracy is temporary, because wealth changes hands (there is a saying in China that wealth does not pass 3 generations), it is the size of the government that is always increasing.

Enron wasn’t badly managed. It was fraudulently managed by one of the President’s good buddies. I don’t know where you live, but I live in California. We had to sit through rolling blackouts for one summer because Enron was literally manipulating power supplies by reducing power sent to California to force prices up. They were a bunch of goddam criminals and because they had the highest levels of government in their pocket, they were permitted to simply be as corrupt as they wanted to be until the whole thing fell apart beyond repair.

Further, many Enron employees (most of whom had no idea what was going on in the management) lost craploads since the company had encouraged its employees to plow as much of their investment into Enron stock as possible.

That some of the leaders in Enron who were involved went to jail is really irrelevant since that doesn’t do a whit to fix the damage that Enron did to this country, all while the CEO was such good friends with the PRESIDENT that the President had a personal nickname for him (Kenny Boy).

Government doesn’t run corporations man. It’s the other way around, at least in America. I’m not some incense-burning hippie either, lest you get the wrong impression about where I’m coming from. I’m fairly libertarian and this kind of shit, whether it’s from private companies or the government, pisses me off. Unfortunately, as Eisenhower warned in his famous speech about the coming dangers of the military-industrial complex, government and big business are so tied together in this country that the government is, I believe, fundamentally incapable of actually exercising meaningful regulation over most industries. It won’t change until money isn’t almost the sole factor that determines who wins elections.

For example, Enron. The company is badly managed, defrauded its shareholders, and it went out of businses, its leaders jailed/fined. There is one less bad company in the world, life goes on. As long as you didn’t put all your eggs in one basket (buy all Enron stocks), you should be OK.

Most of the time if some government run agency got a bad mistake, there are usually little or no punishment, and sometimes even got more money (i.e public school systems, social security etc).

As for trying to find doctors in hypothetical country X, I’m sure there are plenty of OB/GYNs in Sweden, for instance.

There are many legitimate reasons to prefer a private system over a public system, and many legitimate reasons to prefer a public system over a private system. If pressed I guess I’d prefer a combination in which there’s a basic safety net for people who can’t manage it financially and a private system for everyone else, but I tell you what: The current private system sucks. I am all for private industry, believe me (and I’m clearly a capitalist given what I do), but just because it’s private doesn’t mean it’s good.

Enron, for instance, was one of the largest companies in the world and was built almost completely on outright fraud. Wasn’t detected by regulatory agencies earlier because they had the resources to effectively hide and obfuscate things from the gov.

The government is VERY bad at watching over corporate america since most of the government is on their payroll one way or another (lobbyists, campaign donations, etc).

2. it is much easier to watch over a few thousand insurance companies than millions of individuals trying to defraud a system.
Also if a insurance company trying to defraud the insurer, people will sue, will take action. If a politician waste tax $ to build a bridge to no where, nothing will happen.

Because, as I pointed out, Free as in $ is not Free as in Time. If you show up in emergency with anything that won’t kill you in the next two hours, you *will* wait at least two hours. The fear of a long wait in the emergency department serves the same purpose as the fear of a large bill from visiting the emergency department. (Interestingly enough this also means that the poor, to whom time is worth less $, “pay” less than the rich)

Your point about people trying to “convert” their tax into $$ is accurate. However, it applies equally to people trying to “convert” their private health insurance into $$, so really isn’t a comment on either system.