Waiting lines and having a goverrnment beaurocrat get between my doctor and me.

The NHS has been running a program to reduce waiting times to 14 weeks. My surgeon buddies report a 40% drop in private procedures in some areas as people decide they are willing to wait 14 weeks rather than pay privately. The market has spoken. As for a government bureaucrat between you and your doctor: if your surgeon advocates a procedure in the NHS you don't need clerical approval. Whereas you may well need clerical signoff in the US if you want your insurer to pay for it. Fact is that you've got clerical interposition in every direction in the existing system, something that is never balanced against the list of grievances compiled to block consideration of reform.

Actually, it sounds to me like you are <g>. It is obvious to me that you are a socialist and I am a libertarian. We will just have to agree to disagree.

It may be obvious to you but that does not make it true. I see a pattern here: people announce firm opinions and schemes to solve the world's ills and if asked to quantify or justify, name-calling or attribution of motivation quickly follows. It's a shame. FWIW, if I have a position at all it is that the more you know about a topic like this, the more you realize you don't know. I can tell you that even if you'd spent years working with medical coding/billing in the US market and comparing to funding formulae in socialized systems it's not easy to predict how to start reforms. as you note, your existing system does have some redeeming features and you don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. The risk is that it may end up easiest to do nothing at all- again- which will bequeath a monumental problem to the next generation.