It seems you either missed the point of my comment or disagree with me on the fundamental level (to which degree an individual owns himself in a society). Society has absolutely no right to you working a certain amount in my opinion. The healthcare argument I also see very often, which I see quite differently. It begs the question "Why should you pay your neighbor's healthcare?". Instead of adding all these layers of socialization and externalities to address the unfairness inherent in the socialization, why not skip both? Hence why private health insurance is an effective form of measuring that externality in non socialized medicinal systems, and asking whether you are a smoker or non-smoker is the first question in the sign up process, drastically affecting your rates.

This is getting off topic, and say what you will about America's atrocious healthcare system, but the fact that it is not fully socialized is NOT the problem. Real problems: artificial non-market based demand created by partial socialization (medicare and medicaid buying programs) raising prices for the non-socialized group, oppressive FDA (costs 1 billion usd on average to push a drug through), oppressive occupational licensing (very high barrier to entry to becoming a doctor), imbalanced IP system (especially for chemical/drug patents), and plenty more. Eliminating these problems would go a long way to making America the world's best healthcare system (it already is in some regards -- do some research on where all the prime ministers of social medicine countries go for their important surgeries since their systems haven't incorporated the American medical tech yet).

There are still issues to consider with emergency care (where there is typically not market-based selection of your healthcare) but I think government incentives aiding a market based system (similar to the incentives created by Singapore, arguably the best current system) would create a system so superior to any other country's medical system, that it wouldn't be such a central political issue.

No, no I agree completely that things should be taxed to cover externalities. My point was merely that those externalities aren’t inherent to the products but vary between societies due to - for example - what laws, taxes, social safety nets etc exist. Smoking has enormous externalities together with tax funded healthcare. The same can argusbly be said for other things too (e.g sugar).

Universal healthcare itself is a huge discussion but seems off topic here.

Don’t forget employer-tied (!) health insurance.