The people with inside connections, more power, or who make extra payments get the top docs. Regular folk get the rest.

If that's true, then it's more or less the same, no?

Agreed. Except I think the "free" setup is much more expensive.

Are you kidding?

Look up how much US spends on healthcare and how much rest of the world does.

That's an impossible comparison -- "rest of the world."

Is your point, "we spend so much today that we couldn't possibly spend more under a different legislative regime."??

Do you have a reference?

Look at what other OECD states spend per capita. Compare to how much the US spends per capita. For a real WTF look at how much public money the US already spends per capita. This is all a google away. The safe bet based on available data would be that moving our system to be more similar to any of those used by other OECD states would significantly reduce our spending while having little effect on health outcomes.

It's possible some other reforms that differ radically from those systems would improve things, and maybe even be better than anything other OECD states do, but since we have a wealth of real-world data about how the existing systems work and only speculation about most others, it's a much safer move to base reforms on the ones that are observably better than ours in the real world.

What ashark said - you can't do worse in healthcare spending than USA