When an individual creates an enterprise it's expected to fail in 2 years. It does not mean death of the individual, but often it makes 'em go broke. Only one company in a hundred is successful. Other are doomed. Government-run projects do not live in alternative dimension. It is affected by the same things any private organization is affected. It is expected that a country would exist longer than an individual company. But want to bind the whole country to some huge bureaucratic organizations. Say, the one managing healthcare and the one managing pension founds. You won't stop at that, of course, but let's simplify to just that. There would be only two ways for them to survive in a long run. Bloating their budget, eating all other parts of the gov budget. After there is no where to "expand" (keeping the same quality of services), they would had to cut out some of their "clients". For a pension fund it would be to increase the age when people would be able to retire. For healthcare it would be to limit free services reject people who would be able to have certain services for free in certain cases, decrease quality of services. Then it would be inevitable death. As people are not immortal, organizations are not as well. If you had several private companies, the death of one of them would make others stronger. It would get rid of the weakest companies, keeping the strongest alive and in addition they would have opportunity to learn on errors of others. But you have one single company for each sector that manage the whole country. It results in country's collapse. There is no "mountain of evidence from other countries, showing the greatly reduced total costs and improved life expectancy as well as a lack of bankruptcy and financial ruin for those caught in an emergency". The idea of universal health care hasn't been tested by time yet (and in principal it will fail due to things I described above), so it's very reasonable that the US public rejects it.