That "by any metric" is just plain wrong. There's several metrics by which the US healthcare system is among the best--in general, if the metric you are tracking is largely covering the success rates of medical procedures (sibling comment mentions 5-year cancer survival rates, for example), then the US generally scores high. If the metric you are tracking is instead covering general population health or things easily caught with preventative medicine, then the US scores abysmally in those metrics.

In other words, the US healthcare system actually turns out to be very good (if perhaps not on a per-cost metric)... but access to the good healthcare system is extremely poor. And that's kind of what you'd expect for a market-driven system: good healthcare if you can afford it, shit healthcare if you can't.

US Healthcare is expensive, but the quality is better than most other countries.

The American pharma companies also don't do the research, a lot of it comes from scientific institutions funded by public money.

What pharma companies do is provide capital for drug trials which are absurdly expensive, they are more alike investment companies than actual research institutes...

That's certainly not true. Of course compared to pretty much every highly developed country if we factor in relative spending per capita you'd be right.

But yeah, purely market/profit driven systems (with extremely poor and inefficient regulation) certainly don't work in certain sectors like healthcare.

Also it depends on what do you mean by 'socialized medicine', if you're specifically talking about single payer, your point is only valid if you ignore all other countries which don't have single payer besides the US. The Swiss and (as far as I can tell) to a lesser Dutch healthcare systems are 'privatized' to a much higher degree than the one in US i.e. effectively fully, there are no Medicare/Medicaid equivalents there. Instead they are very strictly and relatively efficiently regulated. They pretty much have Obama/Romneycare++.

If you mean something else than single-payer then the US system is arguably heavily 'socialized', both through insurance polling (just like in the countries I mentioned) and because the US government itself spends more on healthcare than most industrialized countries even relative to GDP. e.g. if we exclude all private spending (both individual and insurance) government health spending per capita in the US is significantly higher than in Britain and more than 2x higher than in Spain (and still significantly higher if adjusted by PPP GDP per capita)

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.GHED.PP.CD?locat...