Single-payer systems inevitably give way to normal-people health care approaches

Scott Atlas at the WSJ on how some of Europe's much-vaunted examples of universal health care are feeble and being propped up by a return to private-sector involvement:

Britons who can afford to avoid the NHS are eager to do so. Even with a slight decrease due to the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, about six million British citizens buy private health insurance and about 250,000 choose to pay for private treatment out-of-pocket each year—though NHS insurance costs $3,500 annually for every British man, woman and child.

The socialized-medicine model is struggling elsewhere in Europe as well. Even in Sweden, often heralded as the paradigm of a successful welfare state, months-long wait times for treatment routinely available in the U.S. have been widely documented.

To fix the problem, the Swedish government has aggressively introduced private-market forces into health care to improve access, quality and choices. Municipal governments have increased spending on private-care contracts by 50% in the past decade, according to Näringslivets Ekonomifakta, part of the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise, a Swedish employers' association.

Swedish primary-care clinics and nursing facilities are increasingly run by the private sector or receive substantial public funding. Widespread private competition has also been introduced into pharmacies to tear down the previous government monopoly over all prescription and non-prescription drugs. Though Swedish economist Per Bylund calculates that the average Swedish family already pays nearly $20,000 annually in taxes toward health care, about 12% of working adults bought private insurance in 2013, a number that has increased by 67% in five years, according to the trade organization Insurance Sweden. Almost 600,000 Swedes now use private insurance, though they are "guaranteed" public health care.

The recent Veterans Affairs scandal, following the disastrous ObamaCare rollout, was a red flag about problems of nationalized health. Now concrete evidence is coming in from other countries that have tried it for decades. The reality is that the key goals for health-care reform—reducing spending, expanding access to affordable coverage, preserving personal choice and portability of coverage, promoting competition in insurance markets, and maintaining excellence in medicine—do not require government to directly provide insurance or health care.

Health care is neither a right nor a privilege.  It's just a good old service, and subject to the same market forces as any other service.