I have yet to see an efficient nationalized medical service.
They are usually MUCH better than the U.S. model (in that everyone has basic healthcare and nobody gets bankrupt), but I wouldn't use words like "efficient" and "cost effective" to describe them.
At least within a democracy, they don't get "that" ossified, but you do get a massive, powerful and somewhat corrupt bureaucracy (at least in my country).
I find it incredible that the waste generated is less than the waste from the U.S. insurance system, yet it is so.
Re:Inside the Soviet Army (1982)
by alexeisadeski3 on Monday April 14, 2014 @02:01PM
(#7587747)
Where does he say that socialized medicine can not be efficient, well funded, and cost effective???
He says only that the effect is to place the doctors into a sort of "prison" scenario. Prisons can be efficient and well run. The problem is that they're prisons.
Imagine your own sector being socialized.
The problem with communism isn't that so many of it's services are nationalized, it's that one-party politics leads to an ossified, excessively powerful, corrupt bureaucracy with no checks and balances.
Any political system that lacks dynamism and protects cronyism would suffer the same problems, regardless of it's ideological base. That's why in practice Fascism and Communism produce functionally indistinguishable resultant states.