Yeah... This is the sort of socialist system I want protecting me...

Girl, 13, may be paralysed by disease that baffled doctors for six months - but her mother diagnosed on the internet| News | This is London

Socialism only ensures that everyone gets equally BAD treatment. The free market is a better system.

This is a blatant falsehood. The freemarket has not caused any of these things. There is no freemarket in the U.S. and I would be curious to see what freemarket these statistics are based off of...

A free market is a market in which prices of goods and services are arranged completely by the mutual consent of sellers and buyers. By definition, in a free market environment buyers and sellers do not coerce or mislead each other nor are they coerced by a third party. In the aggregate, the effect of these decisions en masse is described by the law of supply and demand. Free markets contrast sharply with controlled markets, in which governments directly or indirectly regulate prices or supplies, distorting market signals. In the marketplace the price of a good or service helps to quantify its value to consumers and thus balance it against other goods and services. In a free market, this relationship between price and value is more clear than in a controlled market. Through competition between vendors for the provision of products and services, prices tend to decrease, and quality tends to increase. A free market is not to be confused with a perfect market where individuals have perfect information and there is perfect competition.

But wait - there's more:

July 18, 2008
A congressional committee will investigate health insurers' practice of canceling coverage when policyholders get sick, its chairman said Thursday.

The problem first came to light in California, but witnesses testifying before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee suggested that it was more widespread.

The problem affects the individual insurance market, in which 14 million Americans, including nearly 3 million Californians, purchase medical benefits on their own.

In light of proposals to expand the individual market, the committee's chairman, Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills), said the individual market demanded more scrutiny, especially of cancellation practices.

Waxman pointed to one case in which he said a consumer lost his insurance because he failed to disclose headaches on his application for coverage.

He "was terminated because the insurer said he should have known that occasional headaches would later be diagnosed as multiple sclerosis," Waxman said.

Congressional committee will probe health insurers that cancel sick members' coverage - Los Angeles Times


With all its flaws the UK NHS would never cease coverage because a patient was too sick, or because their health care was too expensive.

That's immoral.

'We all pay for the uninsured' - May. 1, 2008

So that's what, 9.4 million uninsured who could have insurance if they chose to enroll? Granted these stats are coming from the CEO of a for-profit insurance company, but that's a heck of a dent in the "47 million uninsured" number that keeps getting bandied about... if people would just take a little bit of initiative and look into programs that are already available to them.