A single-payer system can and does work if it's administered correctly.

I'm not sure our government can administer it correctly.

Too many party first/country second types in elected office.

But there's no question that the system is broken, and it WILL be torn down and rebuilt eventually.

We already have socialized medicine. If you're uninsured and get hauled to the ER, you'll be treated, and the hospital will make up for your lack of coverage by running 32 diagnostic tests on the next insured guy that comes through the doors.

The major problem with the socialized medicine we now have is that health care is being delivered to the uninsured and underinsured via the ER, which is easily the most expensive way to deliver health care. And people go to the ER for sh!t like a simple case of the flu, or a kid with a fever because they have no other access to healthcare. And that's the kind of stuff that's driving the premiums of those that ARE insured through the roof. We're approaching having health care exepnditures totalling 20% of our GDP.

Check this:

National Health Care Spending
In 2008, health care spending in the United States reached $2.4 trillion, and was projected to reach $3.1 trillion in 2012.1 Health care spending is projected to reach $4.3 trillion by 2016.

Health care spending is 4.3 times the amount spent on national defense.

In 2008, the United States will spend 17 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health care. It is projected that the percentage will reach 20 percent by 2017.

Although nearly 46 million Americans are uninsured, the United States spends more on health care than other industrialized nations, and those countries provide health insurance to all their citizens.

Health care spending accounted for 10.9 percent of the GDP in Switzerland, 10.7 percent in Germany, 9.7 percent in Canada and 9.5 percent in France, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development."
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Clearly, it's a broken system. It needs to be fixed, and it could be fixed if people would quit acting like f'n kids about it, and discuss how to go about getting it done. There are single-payer systems that work. Click the link and you can read about systems being used in 5 different countries, and how it's turned out for them.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/countries/

Either that or we could just keep flinging poop. Let me know which way you want to go with it.