Also looking at South Korea and SEA GDP growth (especially compared to most 'developing' countries) they are doing amazing compared or a lot of South American countries who adopted Boliviar style socialism around the same time:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2c/Fo...

https://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2011/7/11/saupload_t...

They did this by opening up and adopting a more modern market oriented approach, mixed with limited state run organizations.

They had some rational social programs in place where externalities in the market weren't being appropriately accounted for, or where market forces were simply immoral (high costs for sick people). But notably didn't over commit to some intense socialist movements like a lot South American countries - who went well beyond public health insurance buying into the Bolivar nonsense - countries in the early/mid 2000s who are only now recovering from yrs of "post-capitalist" experiments which only resulted in mass needless poverty for their citizens in countries which should have been the wealthiest in the region. With people lining up for food rations like its the 1930s Russia and having severely reduced variety of products to select from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolivarianism

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Economy_of_Venezuela [note they were having food shortages and starvation before the oil crisis, the entire system was always unsustainable mirage stirred up with anti-western conspiracy theories of non-existent direct intervention].

The most famous moment on the Ruskies abandoning communism in the late 1980s was that Russians leader visiting an American grocery store and seeing the massive options available, at good prices, to regular middle class citizens. Also note the first thing Venezuela did was claim "access to food was a right" and nationalized a bunch of food industries, quickly resulting in mass starvation and shortages within a few short years.

It would streamline the whole system to just admit Medicare for all is the solution and pushing burderns placed on employers, or worse deterring entrepreneurship by making it super expensive for self-employed people to turn into net job creators - there's tons of pro-market benefits to a state run public insurance policy - especially when the alternative is the current pseudo-private mess they currently have.

Having public health insurance, with some occasional private options, like what we have in Canada is far far more limited than some of the socialist experiments the Bolivars promoted and destroyed multiple countries around them, including Ecuador. So even calling it socialist is probably doing it a disservice. It is state-capitalism, where the state part is the exception to the rule.

Nor did Canada adopt the more heavy-handed approach of the NIH in the UK which nationalized hospitals and a bunch of other pieces of the puzzle which were running perfectly fine independently.

The simplest solutions that are properly tied into incentives is always what works best here.

Even today there are plenty of arguments where the US system is essentially already borerline "socialist" healthcare system but with far fewer of the benefits of either markets or altruistic public run insurance. So 'staying the course' doesn't sound like much of a solution either, besides letting political friends in medicare fleece the government through cronyism.

It won't stop because with the constant local, congressional, and executive meddling to create these "pseudo-markets" which provide few benefits of actual competitive markets nor the central negotiation power of a centralized public insurance program.

And I say that as someone who in most other cases I would learn fiscally conservative.