My problem with that line of thinking is, do we know that this forum is an accurate representation of the entire population? How much have the people on this forum specifically, dealt with their health care system? Up till last year, I never dealt with our health care system. If you had asked me last year, I might have said yay or nay, without having any real experience.
Further, even if you do find someone that did go to the hospital in a socialized health care country, what type of treatment did they have? Some basic things like splinting a broken arm, might be done very well for free... while other more complicated things like the Heart by-pass, or a hip replacement, or something else, the system might fail horribly.
Some problems might not even be known to someone who responds. For example, people in the UK who need medication for arthritis, only 15% get the latest greatest medications. Why? Because the government pays for them, and since the government doesn't have infinite amounts of money, they simply don't buy them. It's not an option. Only those with private insurance can get the newer, better, less side effects, medications. So a patient may think their getting the best treatment, when if fact there are better medications out their, they don't know about them because their government won't buy them.
Finely, and this is a big issue. Latent failure. This is the idea that when socialism first starts, everything works wonderfully (normally), but as it goes on, the system crashes, as all socialism does. France is a perfect example. In France, it's free, it's universal, it's tax payer funded, it's peachy it's great... That was 1985... but that system has been in deficit every single year. They raised taxes, raised taxes, raised taxes and the economy suffered, but it still didn't cover the cost. The health care deficit in France is projected to be 66 Billion. People pay over 50% of their income in taxes, and still the system is bankrupt. Now they are cutting services. And future cuts, and higher taxes are in the works as we speak.
Now an end user may not know this, may think the system is wonderful... but it's still failing! The system does not work... Again... even if you find a french guy who says it's great, the system is crumbling around them, whether they 'like' the system or not. Of course if their as lame as I think, they likely have a bunch of nutty people saying the reason their system is killing people and failing, and crashing around them is "bigoil" and if they just embraced Geothermal power, over nuclear, then all these socialized medical problems would disappear.
