We do need "SOCIALIZED MEDICINE" in the US. I put that in big scary quotes to freak out the free-market conservative types.

The truth is that our system is incredibly inefficient. Just think of all the lost time, and the wasted resources, that come from having our medical professionals drowning in a sea of insurance company paperwork. Each form completely different... and trying to confuse people so that the company can avoid having to pay. Most hospitals have a whole floor now that's just devoted to insurance processing.

Then there are the advertising costs, and the administrative overhead, and the huge profit margins that come from private insurance. It's silly.

The same goes for the pharmaceutical companies. They're the most profitable business in America, and we pay higher drug costs than anybody else on the planet. Most of the drug research is done in universities with taxpayer money, and then we hand the patents over to pharmaceutical companies so they can extract monopoly pricing for the length of the patent. Their choices as to which drugs to research and produce are completely driven by stock and profit considerations, so the research goes to creating a half-dozen erection pills rather than something more genuinely important.

I think we need a thorough redesign of the system. There's no reason that we can't learn from everybody else and create a model program... other than the opposition from special interests. We're essentially paying for the power that the pharmaceutical, insurance, and doctor's lobbies have in Washington. Pharma and insurance in particular would be screwed by meaningful reform - so they fight it.

If I was going to create a single-payer system, I'd also go after the pharmaceutical industry. The prices we pay for drugs are one of the biggest factors in skyrocketing health costs and they're way out of line with where they should be. We're getting almost no knew drugs from an industry that takes taxpayer funded research and charges us monopoly prices for it. I'm sorry, but I don't think we should all have to empty our wallets and suffer just to keep up the stock price on Pfizer. It's a stupid way to run an economy.

There's a great article about the pharma industry and what's wrong with it here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17244