I’m sympathetic to the arguments in this article, whose author would have gone just about bankrupt had she lived in New Zealand and had to privately pay for her cancer drugs.  She’s right that governments will check costs and might well be cruel as a means of saving money rather than helping people.  That’s true.  But I still don’t see how that is any worse than it would be with insurance companies trying to save money now (that’s thing one).  Thing two is a question of innovation: it might well be true that medical science will not move as fast if there’s not as much money in it, but the government has a lot of money–military science is publicly funded, and it’s doing just fine.  Honestly, I would much rather worry about a medical industrial compex than the military one.  Here’s a bit from the article:

Looking at the crazy-quilt American system, you might imagine that someone somewhere has figured out how to deliver the best possible health care to everyone, at no charge to patients and minimal cost to the insurer or the public treasury. But nobody has. In a public system, trade-offs don’t go away; if anything, they get harder.