Socialized anything is socialism. There’s no reason the free market, families, churches, neighbors, private foundations for specific serious diseases, etc, can’t provide good medical care to everyone who deserves it.
We already have largely socialized medicine in the US. The bulk of medical care is provided under Medicare or Medicaid funding, plus a bevy of state programs. And very nearly all the rest is provided in facilities that are built around those programs (hewing tightly to a maze of regulations that are a prerequisite for receiving reimbursement under those programs), and to patients whose care is being paid for by insurance programs that are subject to such intense government regulation, that they might as well be government programs as far as cost-effectiveness, incentive to patients to take care of their own health, and incentive to healthcare providers to provide good care, are concerned. The elderly have basically no choice but to use the Medicare system, as they’ve been taxed for it all their lives, and thus haven’t been able to save their own money to pay for their own privately chosen care.
The physician training program is an absolute horror, abusing young doctors with health-damaging hours and pay at a fraction of real market value, under a “private” system which is authorized by the government as the sole route to becoming licensed to practice medicine in this country, and which assigns young doctors to a training program. Don’t like the program you’ve been assigned to, because the people running it break rules right and left and force you to give lousy care, and plus it’s a thousand miles away from your parents’ home where your mother is caring for your father who has advanced Alzheimer’s? Tough Sh!#. Your only option is to quit, and not practice medicine, and find some other way to pay off the average $250,000 student debt load of a medical school graduate. Funny how the concept of “freedom” is nowhere to be found in there, for the young doctors, or for the patients who would like be cared for by doctors who aren’t being forced to work 100 hours a week and stumble about the hospital in a sleep-deprived stupor.
> Socialized anything is socialism.
That’s nonsense-on-stilts! You have socialized Armed Forces, several socialized Law Enforcement Organizations and a socialized Postal Service. Are those “Socialism”, too?