Many countries chose a long time ago to guarantee their citizens cradle-to-grave healthcare. Those countries began building hospitals, laboratories and clinics, hiring doctors and nurses, building nursing homes, and so on. The government did all this.
And now their governments are more or less well situated and equipped to provide healthcare to all.
There are some problems with it - waiting lists for certain surgeries and procedures, and so on. Their doctors don't make as much as their counterparts in the U.S.
But who cares, really?
The United States is prevented by its Constitution from guaranteeing cradle-to-grave healthcare, as they do in, for example, Canada. The Tenth Amendment prohibits the Federal government from (basically) doing anything other than the 17 things set out in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.
For your edification, I have reproduced them here:
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States; To borrow money on the credit of the United States; To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes; To establish a uniform rule of naturalization, and uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies throughout the United States; To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures; To provide for the punishment of counterfeiting the securities and current coin of the United States; To establish post offices and post roads; To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries; To constitute tribunals inferior to the Supreme Court; To define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and offenses against the law of nations; To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water; To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years; To provide and maintain a navy; To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces; To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions; To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the states respectively, the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress; To exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten miles square) as may, by cession of particular states, and the acceptance of Congress, become the seat of the government of the United States, and to exercise like authority over all places purchased by the consent of the legislature of the state in which the same shall be, for the erection of forts, magazines, arsenals, dockyards, and other needful buildings;--And To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof.
You may notice that the Congress and President now TOTALLY DISREGARD the provisions of the Tenth Amendment, and take upon themselves any and all powers that they feel like. But that was not always the case, and at the time in history when the "healthcare" decision might have been made, we still took the Tenth Amendment seriously.
And because "we" didn't amend the Constitution and do the right thing in, say 1945, we have evolved in a different way such that it will never be possible to have socialized medicine the way the countries in Europe now do. Insurance companies would be superfluous (scratch a couple million jobs). Doctors would make a fraction of what they do now. Medical schools would have to be funded by government, and admission would be stricktly on merit. It simply wouldn't work.
So today's Democrats would like, alternatively, to have the so-called "single-payer" system, in which, basically, everyone in the country would be on Medicare/Medicaid, and the insurance companies would be superfluous. The purpose of Obama-care was to create a bureaucratic nightmare so awful that the people would quickly rise up and DEMAND single-payer.
So from that standpoint, maybe it's not a failure.
