That might mean longer wait times. (Then again, it might not, if doctors today are spending more than 10% of their time talking to insurance companies.) But it would not mean “fewer choices.” When the government is the single-payer paying for 90%+ of all health care, then 90%+ of all doctors will be on this plan, and available as choices for us. In contrast, with many insurance plans today, many of us only can choose from perhaps a third of all doctors today. All this said, I am opposed to socialized medicine and think the government could do more to improve health care by getting out of the way of competition (e.g., ending care mandates, allowing inter-state plans, and providing tax parity for self-purchased plans).

Sure it will. C’mon up to Canuckistan to see it in action. All doctors, including the good ones work less, because an inevitable feature of the system, on top of rationing, is price controls. ‘Hey Doc, you get $x for your work, even if you’re a schmo.’

Pretty soon all you’ve got is lazy schmos, or good docs who act like lazy schmos.

What would happen if every doctor in the USA cut back on his work hours by 10%?

Followed up by: And you want universal health care because…?

That being said, we already have a ‘lite’ version of socialized medicine – relatively few people are mentally “connected” to the costs of health care. Doctors and hospitals already have to give free care to whoever needs it, and if they’re lucky they’ll chisel some miserly amount out of the government. Otherwise, they make up for it as best they can by soaking everyone else. It’s not so much a vicious cycle – it’s too disorganized to be called that. More like a vicious cyclone.

Pooled risk (insurance) makes a great deal of sense, but when people can dip into the pool without paying everything goes to hell. Romney tried to address this in Massachusetts with a government / private hybrid. I have my doubts as to how well that’s going to work out. The biggest problem is that you have people (liberals) who have no problem holding a gun to someone else’s head (the health care industry) and forcing them to provide free services in the name of compassion. The secondary problem is that people with job-provided coverage usually have zero incentive to act as intelligent health care consumers and as a result of over-consumption we have mindlessly restrictive insurance plans and HMOs.

A practical solution is a tough nut to crack – it has to address the liberal concerns (sorry, we can’t just out-vote them and make them go away) and start forcing people that do have coverage to use it efficiently.

Universal Health care will be a boon to the medical tourism industry, particularly in Mexico and Cuba.

I went from the onset of symptoms to treatment in about two months, this consisted of three different MRI’s over a three week period, a spinal tap, blood work, consultation with radiologists and neurologists, steriod infusion to mitigate symptoms and now, beginning of treament with a genetically engineered drug that did not exist 15 years ago.

None of this was cheap, but when the difference for me was cost versus waiting and potentially having symptoms get worse, the choice was ridiculously easy.
I am thankful we have a system where I have the choice between fast and expensive and cheap and slow and where a biotech firm can make enough return on its investment to justify investment in drugs for treating diseases that affect a relatively small number of people.