Jake,

If socialized care is funded from taxes, it is essentially a great big compulsory insurance scheme little different from the one to which you presumably belong in the US, except that the directors are effectively appointed by the voting public rather than by shareholders wanting profits. And the cost is typically less.

IMHO the main issue is to ringfence taxation for healthcare purposes. If it comes out of a general taxation pool, government can be just as irrational as insurance administrators incentivized to save $. There are also risks of politicization with funding timed according to elections rather than need.

IMHO the ideal model is a joint public/private model. Quality care is available for all, with silver teapots and individual surgeon visits for those who are willing to pay to go private. What usually happens is that amply rewarded physicians in private are willing to work extensively in public for much lower fees because of the opportunity to train newcomers, access to cool new technology unaffordable in private, and also because of the feelings of community service that are still fairly strong in health practitioners, many of whom spend most of their working life in the same facility and show extraordinary loyalty to it.