Heavy (arm chair shrinks)

[Zauper]

FYI there is a difference between "single payer" and "socialized medicine". The government runs socialized medicine. Single payer systems would run almost identical to what you see at a doctor in the U.S. Currently your doctor's office submits a bill to an insurance company. With single payer the same clinic sends a bill to uncle sam. You would probably use a drivers license (or other I.D.) instead of submitting an insurance card.

The U.S. Army could be called a "socialized army". The soldiers work directly for the federal government. Citizens do not have to send money to a insurance company for national security insurance. The FBI, state department, and commerce department are also "socialized". People do not talk about the army as "our socialized army" because the alternative is dumb enough to be unworthy of serious discussion.

Socialized meds: United Kingdom, Finland, Spain, Isreal, Cuba...
Single payer: Canada, France...

Your argument is that Canada is single payer instead of socialized medicine because of what, exactly? Because each province is a separate payer? That would seem to argue it's not a national single payer system. Yet, the government (fed + provincial) are the ones setting the rules and paying.

Unless, of course, you have private insurance, in which case you get better care.

Or France, where the government sets the price for care and pays -- that's not socialized? Why, because doctor's aren't directly employed by the government? Is that your argument? How then, do you handle the provision that allows the NHS in England to pay for care at private hospitals, rather than public hospitals? Doesn't that run counter to a truly socialized system? Similarly, how there are both private and public hospitals in Spain, and that the waittime for non-emergency procedures in Spain is less if you have private insurance? Finland's private sector portion of their health system?....etc. None of these systems are truly single payer or socialized.

Point being, trying to label and make distinct single payer (especially when Bernie's proposal was Medicare for all, if I recall correctly) vs socialized seems silly.

The only possible way to have a non-socialized single payer system would be something like the TRICARE model where you bid out the contract management to a private company who in turn sets pricing/etc, but even that would be a bit tricky. TRICARE got renamed, didn't it? Whatever it's called now.

On the other hand, you could argue that much like many of those countries, the US has a partially socialized medicine system (the VA) sitting alongside their private medicine systems, and that traditional Medicare operates as a single payer for the ~40M beneficiaries it covers. Though looking at the trends in Medicare, you'd see that traditional Medicare is falling in popularity vs private (MA) options. Drug coverage, of course, gets funky.