You keep looking at England which does have many problems with its system so how about look to Finland and Sweeden and see how theirs stack up as well as other countries. By the way MRSA is a big problem in this country right now
I keep looking at England because that's where I have the most experience of the medical system. And the socialised medical system in England is so badly broken it's not funny.
One brutal reality that has to be addressed is that healthcare is the sort of thing that ultimately has to be rationed one way or another because there can only ever be so many resources to go round. There is only so much money, there are only so many doctors, only so much hospital time available, and so on. If people are willing to accept that their condition doesn't need medical attention because it will go away by itself naturally imposes less of a burden upon the system as a whole, but as soon as people who have been sneezing for three days figure they need to go to the doctor for some pills they make the situation worse (and of course there's nothing a doctor can do to fix a cold anyway). If people are willing to accept that their condition might be troublesome to them but it's a lower priority than someone else's more serious condition then some form of queueing system can work, but if people are used to the idea that they should get the treatment they choose at a time that suits them the whole thing starts to fall apart.
There's also the issue of medical insurance - if any mistake, however innocent, is likely to result in expensive legal action it is inevitable that the cost of insurance rises rapidly, which means costs for everyone have to rise to pay for the insurance, which in turn means that either the end user pays more or the government pays more on their behalf.
When something is free at the point of use people typically regard it as priceless or worthless. The trouble is the growing number of people who regard such things as worthless and little more than a system ripe for abuse. I still remember the time my wife had been loaned a crutch by the hospital after badly spraining her ankle. A few days later she didn't need it any more so I took it back to the hospital. The staff looked as if I'd given them a piece of myrrh - they clearly didn't expect to ever see it again. I wonder just how much taxpayer's money is wasted on crutches that end up thrown in the river, and to what extent having to pay to borrow a crutch would focus people on actually returning it.
I don't dispute for a second that the US healthcare system is badly broken. The trouble with a centrally funded and managed system is the inevitability of costs rising out of control. In Scandinavian countries they are generally more tolerant of higher taxation and more government involvement in their day-to-day lives. I'm not sure the political system in the US is such that a centrally funded healthcare system would work well, and certainly not sure that the American people are willing to pay higher taxes to find an ever-wider range of medical services, especially when those services will include things people find morally objectionable.
Look at the outcry over employers being required to fund health insurance that includes access to abortion. Will the people worrying about being "forced to pay for abortions" be happy to fund gender realignment, abortions, boob jobs for would-be porn starlets, fertility treatments for drug addicts who want a child even though any child would immediately be taken from them at birth, and the like?
