A Little Socialized health care blogging

I know it's pretty cheap to just blatantly steal stuff from other people's blogs and still somehow pretend that you are blogging, but I linked above to Michelle Malkin's blog entry that discusses some of the health care problems in Great Britain and Canada. She links to this article about Canada and to this article about Great Britain.

I took a class in Scotland in my law school exchange program on comparitive health care systems and laws, so it's a point of interest to me. My very quick over-simplified discussion of the problems with health care in the U.S. and in socialized countries is this: The problem is with the third party payor systems. In the U.S. that is insurance companies (who do a better job than the government does, but are strangely both over-regulated and under-regulated at the same time - How 'bout we just say that the focus of regulations tends to fall in the wrong areas). In the socialized countries, they just really do a terrible job of dispensing the proper health care, so, while it may be "free" on an individual level, it is generally not especially high quality and the waiting can be deadly.

Also, socialized medical systems tend to be less innovative in discovering new treatments - probably because they have a lower profit incentive (they will only get so much from the nationalized health system). They also have made claims that they do a better job of preventive medicine, but I have never seen anything that supports their position.

Anyway, let me know what you think. I don't want the U.S. to go this route, but I am a little concerned that we are headed that way if we don't do something to drive health care costs down (I think the answer is less regulation and more competition).

Kid H.