Excerpts from Slate -

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Phillip Longman published an article in the Washington Monthly that
states: Socialized medicine has been tried in the United States, and
it has proven superior to health care supplied by the private sector.

The socialized medicine to which I refer is the complex of hospitals
managed by the Veterans Administration. Longman cites a study
published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2003 comparing
veterans' hospitals with fee-for-service health care funded by
Medicare. Both, of course, constitute socialized medicine in the sense
that both are paid for by the federal government - but the hospitals
treating elderly patients on Medicare are not government-run
institutions.

By every criterion, the New England Journal found the veterans'
hospitals to be superior.

Surveys by the National Committee for Quality Assurance and other
organizations have reached the same conclusion. The superiority of VA
hospitals is so obvious that by now it ought to be common knowledge.

But it isn't, because an insane political consensus that firmly
opposes turning health care over to the government - because the
government is presumed incapable of doing anything well - doesn't want
to hear that government hospitals are outperforming private hospitals.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2114554