> If my choice is to pay for cancer treatment or die
In a socialized medicine system, someone else is making this choice for you. Medical costs (drugs, doctors' education and time, research costs, equipment) are unbounded, while resources are not (no matter what kind of insurance you have), so tradeoffs have to be made. ("What? My daughter is dying from an extremely rare disease and you're not having 1000 PhD researchers working on the cure?! You're spending the resources on curing breast cancer instead?!? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU!!!") AFAIK (though I haven't deeply researched this topic) society-level recommendations aren't made on what is best, but on what is most cost effective (e.g. how often you should have mammography, when you should start having regular colon cancer scans) so it's perfectly reasonable, if you're rich(er), to supplement the public medical system with some extra resources of your own to improve the health outcomes of yourself and/or people close to you. In addition, that funds new research (e.g. the anti-aging craze currently happening in SV, funded mostly by rich billionaires that don't want to die... the medical system doesn't even recognize aging as a disease (so drugs can't be approved to be "anti-aging")!)
In a capitalist system someone else is making the choice for me too: VISA. I’d rather the government take a wholistic view of resource allocation than a luck based bank account balance strategy.
In a socialized medicine system, someone else is making this choice for you. Medical costs (drugs, doctors' education and time, research costs, equipment) are unbounded, while resources are not (no matter what kind of insurance you have), so tradeoffs have to be made. ("What? My daughter is dying from an extremely rare disease and you're not having 1000 PhD researchers working on the cure?! You're spending the resources on curing breast cancer instead?!? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU!!!") AFAIK (though I haven't deeply researched this topic) society-level recommendations aren't made on what is best, but on what is most cost effective (e.g. how often you should have mammography, when you should start having regular colon cancer scans) so it's perfectly reasonable, if you're rich(er), to supplement the public medical system with some extra resources of your own to improve the health outcomes of yourself and/or people close to you. In addition, that funds new research (e.g. the anti-aging craze currently happening in SV, funded mostly by rich billionaires that don't want to die... the medical system doesn't even recognize aging as a disease (so drugs can't be approved to be "anti-aging")!)