Socialism ...

As with everything they do, the Rethugs and their "base" (Big Insurance, Big Pharma) are trying to scare you out of demanding serious healthcare reform. Avedon (who lives with the British system) lends a little reality:

Depending on what poll you read, anywhere from 60% to 80% of Americans like the sound of single-payer, and the same is even truer of physicians. But every effort is being made to keep single-payer off the table. This is because, we are told, Americans want to keep paying insurance company bureaucrats to try to prevent them from getting healthcare rather than cutting out the middle-man and the profit motive (and get their health insurance from a less avaricious and cold-hearted source). And because some people actually believe the stories they hear about how bad all that "socialized medicine" in the rest of the world is. I'll tell you for free that there is nothing superior about commercial medicine in America to the genuinely socialized (not just single-payer) system in the United Kingdom. Yes, some UK hospitals aren't as good as they should be, and yes, some UK doctors are jerks, and yes, you might not get elective surgery scheduled within a week of asking for it, but that's even more true in America. Under the NHS, though, you don't have to spend weeks or months on the phone with the insurance company trying to convince them that they should deliver on getting you healthcare you actually need and have been paying for - and you don't have to worry about what it will cost. There is no arguing between your doctor and bean-counters, and there's no co-pay, either. You will get the treatment your doctor recommends in reasonable time. But, as with so many things, we've got the memes running in the other direction until we don't even know how many Americans are in agreement with us.