OK - this debate is meant to be measuring capitalism against socialism, by comparing various countries' healthcare systems with each other, and that's all very fine, but I think we must just stop casting slurs at each other about who is more or less American than who. So far, Sen. McCarthy has not posted to this thread (assuming he's still alive!) and I'd rather he didn't.

I'll do my best to behave too (at least no-one has accused me of being un-American - lol).

We seem to have established that the primary reason for eschewing a state-sponsored heathcare system is that it is wrong to reward people who try to cheat the system, by giving them the benefits of a public health service at the expense of others. I agree. It is wrong. But as has already been pointed out, it is even more wrong to deny people who are not cheats, but who genuinely cannot afford treatment.

So this brings out an admission of something I haven't owned up to before: sometimes "free" healthcare services do provide treatment to people who have not paid into the system. In the UK, readers of the Daily Mail (I must be careful about the aspersions I cast ... see above) rail and rant and have apoplectic fits about the hoardes of Afghans and Pakistanis who enter the country illegally, sign on for unemployment benefits, march their four wives into hospital so they can be delivered of their babies for free, and then try to blow up our buses and underground stations. Yes, I admit, these systems are open to abuse. Yet the NHS survives, and so do we. That's because the true level of abuse is low. It isn't easy to cheat the system, especially if you can't read or speak English, and I would venture to suggest that most successful cheats owe their success to a lazy or inefficient clerk rather than to their own skillful manipulations.

And a lazy or inefficient clerk in a private healthcare system will forget to bill some people.

It has also been said that a private system will allow people to (a) prioritise their spending on health - some will want cover for everything, others only for accident and emergncy care, and (b) to exercise their freedom of choice. OK - that's fair. I don't have much to say about that, except that I don't think those are important freedoms in this context. Freedom of expression is one thing, freedom to decide who will cure you is another.

But I would point out that, here in the UK, I can choose who will be my GP, and if I am to be hospitalised, I can persuade him to send me to a London teaching hospital rather than the local city hospital, if I think it would be better for me.

Furthermore, you won't be excluded from the treatment of some disease you are prone to, or which already exists at the time you take out your policy. If the health service can treat you, it will.

Finally, I think that the chemical companies of the world have demonstrated perfectly that competition under capitalism does not force prices down. The prices of medicines are maintained at artificially high levels for far too long, supposedly to recoup R&D costs. Frankly, I don't believe it. I think competition under capitalism exists only for as long as it takes for a tacit cartel to come about, where the chemical companies do not sell their drugs below a certain price level to cushion their profits, although they might compete with each other above those prices.