It’s already going on in Great Britain and Canada, and the results are not promising or encouraging.
Might be. Nevertheless the situation in the US and Europe can not be compared for historical reasons. It is illusionary to change the European systems completely. Therefore we Euros will have to deal with imperfect but "righteous" public medicare now and in the future. It is indeed true that European medicare might be not the best, but in Germany it is possible to make a private insurance which guarantees you expensive top-treatment if you have the money to do it. I.e. my own father got some surgery at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York (where a uncle of mine is working as a professor) and it was paid (incl. the 1st class room) by his German insurance. Nevertheless even without that it has to be said that the German medicare system is maybe not perfect but it works quite properly. In my impression there is no big difference in the usual practical quality to the US or Canada (two countries I also had to visit Doctors) although most of the German medicare is state driven (over a obligatory insurance).*
As a European I am not too deep into this issue so I am not in the position to rate about the decision of President Bush whether it is reasonable to exclude American kids from poor families from medicare paid by the public or not. I learned not to believe into my own European sources of media if it comes to such issues. One thing is for sure: His "no" to the related law in America was used by the MSM in Europe to intensify his public image of being a "heartless warmonger" who let "American kids die" to finance his "war for oil". Even Stalin probably has a better kudos than President Bush in contemporary Europe. What is your opinion to that issue?
* Something "funny": Germans with private insurance usually do not live longer since their doctors do more (well paid) treatment for them that is lethal in the end. There are quite good statistics about this coherence. My uncle from New York told me once that I should live healthy and that I should avoid physicians. That would be the best recipe to survive in the long term. He probably was right. :-)