Why do you segue from single-payer to “socialism”?
Btw not sure about the states, but here in Europe, Single-payer works fine for auto repair, it’s exactly what happens when your car breaks down during the initial warranty - the garage is paid by the car manufacturer, not you. Far less stress than having to tow your car from garage to garage to get quotes :)
But single-payer (and not single-provider) is not state control of the means of production. The means of "production" remain private, it's just that everyone is covered by basic state insurance.
Honestly, having lived and worked in several single-payer countries, it works really well - I'd even say that it works better than pure state-run systems like the UK
https://www.fmi.org/docs/default-source/gr-state/price-gougi...
Should we have single-payer markets for auto repairs, then? Or how about toilet paper, especially in a pandemic? Both of those are very inelastic, yet socialism has a particularly poor record of producing either reliably.
> I've been on the receiving end of a $15K air ambulance bill (thankfully covered by insurance) as well as the out of network specialist at an in-network hospital. The latter is particularly galling. What are you supposed to do, interrogate every person that comes in the room?
Yes, this is frustrating. It also has very little to do with a free market. Health care (and health care billing and insurance and medical devices etc.) have been regulated into oblivion, to the point that the prices make no sense and are more like Monopoly money than anything real.
If I had my way, I'd have a high-deductible (at least $10k) universal single-payer system supplemented by individual private insurance. Most routine costs would be paid directly by patients at the point of care, and providers would have to suck it up to figure out what their prices actually were.
That would actually give us much more of a free market than we have today, despite the large welfare-state component.
EDIT: Meant to include a link to the classic Arrow paper about health economics.[1] My own comment about it is that third-party payers are the only robust reason for increases in health costs over time. We see that in every market where third parties subsidize transactions between first and second parties: health care/insurance, tuition/student loans, even housing/subsidized mortgages.
[1] http://public.econ.duke.edu/~hf14/teaching/socialinsurance/r...