If that's the level of discourse you are sinking to, you are a sad example of what is happening to this country and this site. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Right at the moment, the cost of health care and health care administration is crippling the American economy, it prevents many people from taking entrepreneurial risks because they can't afford to jeopardise their health coverage. The cost of health coverage and care and the financialization of the housing market are two of the factors most responsible for the disappearance of the middle class in this country. And if you're worried about the United States falling prey to disastrous political ideology the lack of a stable middle class is a far greater risk factor than socialized medicine.

The crux of the debate is whether the system should be centralized more or move toward individual human actors, whether these system could do better than the other, or whether it is something in between.(Ethical and political views are another story)

I believe the pundit was arguing that the most extreme example clearly demonstrate the fallacy of using central planning to do resource allocation.

Swedens, Denmark, and Canada are mixed economies which make it difficult to discern the effect of free market economies versus socialist system.

You understand the the US is atypical in the way that it treats health care? The implication that pretty much the rest of the western world is communist because they ensure that everyone has access to at least some kind of health care is completely insane. You're using the "labelling it" technique, which is essentially, "If I can give a name to the thing I'm arguing against, then it's wrong!" (see what I just did there?)

A legitimately elected government providing services that its citizens may choose to use or not use is not communism. It's also not nazism or the boogeyman.

See, I would consider healthcare a much more basic service than a huge standing military, but nobody seems to question that that should be government-operated. The USSR also had a 100% government-operated military! Wow, so does China! And North Korea! And Iran! My word, the USA must be the most terrible country on earth!

You seem to have a strange definition of communism, as well as the history of nazism. Rather, you seem to be buying into the American propaganda that "democracy is the great good".

A pure implementation of communism is necessarily democratic. Think about it. If all goods, and all production, are controlled by the body of people, then everything must be done by consensus.

And you'll recall that in Germany, Hitler was democratically elected to power, and later assumed complete control again by election.

You understand the the US is atypical in the way that it treats health care?

You're just using the eight-year-old's "but johnny gets to stay up late" technique. And the answer is the same: just because one party does something really has not connection to whether it's the right thing for a different party to do.

Anyway, the problem here politically is that the treatment of disease will immediately become politicized. In fact, it is already. People with mundane diseases will plod along, without any real progress made in cures.

But diseases having real political constituencies -- AIDS/HIV is the big example -- will get enormous research, despite the fact that they account for a relatively small portion of the populace. Today, AIDS gets many times more funding per-sufferer than does, e.g., breast cancer.

Today the government is the largest single funder of healthcare. But once they crowd out other actors, the entire medical profession will be political. That means that treatments will be put onto the approved list, and research dollars will be allocated, as a way of pandering for votes.

This isn't an abstract fear: the government does this immediately upon getting involved. For example, look at the recent GM takeover. Despite Obama's claims (continuing to this day) that they don't want to micro-manage GM, Congress immediately set out preventing measures to make GM financially viable, such as closing dealerships. Local car dealerships are a surprisingly powerful constituency, and they get the bureaucrats working in their own interests in no time.

I was being ironic and parroting the sentiments expressed in the post I replied to, which implied that my assertion that there are gains to be made by centralised government providing basic services was akin to Mao's "great leap forward" and various other things generally considered "communist". I cited Nazism just to invoke Godwin's law and make the utter preposterousness of the argument evident. Basically, the post I was responding to made the leap from "elected government providing services to citizens" to "THAT'S COMMUNISM/TERRORISM/-ISM-ISM!", which is patently absurd.

I used the "democractically elected" argument to differentiate from a totalitarian state that removes the freedom of choice from its citizens. I'm not making any value-based statement about that, rather I'm just providing a point of reference, considering that all of the countries we were referring to with government-provided healthcare are "western democracies" in the very traditional sense.

> You're just using the eight-year-old's "but johnny gets to stay up late" technique. And the answer is the same: just because one party does something really has not connection to whether it's the right thing for a different party to do.

Once again, I was responding to the tone of the post, which seemed to suggest that the entire world would crumble if they went down this path. I was simply countering that the US is one of the few countries that doesn't provide healthcare in the way I described, which suggests that it's likely that it would succeed in the US in the same way that it has succeeded elsewhere.

It's a particularly arrogant brand of exceptionalism that would suggest that something that the rest of the developed world does is somehow totally unsuitable for implementation in the US. I mean, is the suggestion there that the US is completely different from other countries with similarly-structured economies and demographics?

> Today the government is the largest single funder of healthcare. But once they crowd out other actors, the entire medical profession will be political. That means that treatments will be put onto the approved list, and research dollars will be allocated, as a way of pandering for votes.

> But diseases having real political constituencies -- AIDS/HIV is the big example -- will get enormous research, despite the fact that they account for a relatively small portion of the populace. Today, AIDS gets many times more funding per-sufferer than does, e.g., breast cancer.

There are not necessarily efficiencies of scale in medical research. Providing 10 times more funding will not provide a cure 10 times faster. Also, the general umbrella of "cancer research" almost certainly gets more funding than HIV/AIDS research. I'm not a medical professional, but I assume that significant advances made in one sub-field of cancer research are likely to have impacts within many other sub-fields (in terms of increased understanding or promising treatment/prevention avenues).

> Today the government is the largest single funder of healthcare. But once they crowd out other actors, the entire medical profession will be political. That means that treatments will be put onto the approved list, and research dollars will be allocated, as a way of pandering for votes.

That sounds like a problem with a particular instance of a government, not with governments everywhere. Most scientific and medical research funding in any country I've lived in is administered by a reasonably apolitical body consisting largely of senior members of relevant research communities. Policy makers then provide strategic direction to these bodies by setting priorities and earmarking some funding. It's really not as though political entities are governing the entire process. It's more likely that policy analysts are looking at diseases and demographics, and managing limited funds on the basis of where it can be best spent.

Not that I'm saying research funding models are perfect. In fact, they are completely bonkers. But they are not completely bonkers because of high-level political intervention.

Finally, I know I'm going to regret asking, but what is the "real political constituency" of HIV/AIDS that makes it different from any other disease with a similar number of sufferers and similar treatment/prevention options?