First: who said socialized medicine was some sort of magic bullet? There is no magic bullet of any kind. You want a service, you have to pay for it.

Second: It's so typical of detractors of socialized medicine to come out and say "it costs too much" without ever denying that it costs half of what our system costs. So let's examine your logic: We shouldn't consider European socialized medicine because it costs half as much as our system costs. Brilliant! And how do we rank in the World Health Survey? For all our spending we rank just above Cuba. (see http://www.photius.com/rankings/healthranks.html)

Third: European nations, particularly Germany, are going through a tight period of budget deficits not because socialized medicine and other social services cost too much, but because they (like so many others) participated in our current financial mess:

This sharp increase in deficit spending stems mainly from the stimulus package announced on Tuesday by Chancellor Angela Merkel. At 50 billion euros (66 billion dollars), it is the largest since 1945. [...] Other elements include a 100-billion-euro loan guarantee programme to help stricken companies hobbled by the credit crunch and a one-off, 100-euro extra child benefit payment.

(see http://www.eubusiness.com/news-eu/1231921022.85/)

So don't blame socialized medicine for the excesses of the financial class. As usual there will be those who wish to balance budgets on the backs of the poor when the fault lies elsewhere. In our own country we are already being told that we can't afford Social Security and Medicare. But we can, apparently, affort to spend $ trillions on bailouts for the self-same thieves on Wall Street who are telling us this. And speaking of excesses, we could afford a dandy socialized medical system if we would stop wildly over-spending on "defense." (10 times what our nearest competitor--China--does. And that doesn't include our wars of choice.)

The New Yorker piece was fantastic. The author was thorough in examining medical practices across the nation. But the article devotes not a single word on how other industrialized nations do it. We aren't alone in this problem. They have it too, and for the most part seem to have solved it. For example, he states:

We can turn to insurers (whether public or private), which have proved repeatedly that they can’t do it.

But somehow single-payer systems in Europe, notably in Spain, France, the Scandinavian countries, and others, spend half of what we do, with better outcomes. Could it be that in their case the public "insurer" (the government) has repeatedly shown that they can do it? That they can impose a quality-first approach?

We cannot advance our understanding of this problem by holding to worn out cliches like "the government is not the answer", and by ignoring those who have succeeded. By all means lets take Grand Junction and Mayo to heart. But lets also examine what is going on in Sweden, France, etc. They provide some large scale working examples.

they didn't manage to become conservatives in the process.

Or white. :)

My wife graduated magna cum laude. I know what she had to do to get this honor. It wasn't a trivial accomplishment. Her school had cum laude (top 10%), magna cum laude, (top 5%) and summa cum laude (top 2%). I'll bet a donut that Fred Barnes didn't graduate with any of these honors.

But it is also true that in the period from the late '70s to now real income for working and middle class Americans has dropped even as corporate profits soared, while simultaneously health care costs and college tuition have skyrocketed. These factors have also played a role in the current mess as many people have struggled just to maintain the lifestyles they were used to (let alone move into more affluent neighborhoods, which, not coincidentally, have the better schools), send their kids to college, etc. Yes, they should have retrenched, but this just points out the foolishness of American corporations in shipping jobs overseas, busting unions, and cutting salaries. These people also happen to be your customers.

The financial industry also bears a large proportion of the blame as they set up the business model wherein a customer that defaults is more profitable than a customer that diligently pays back their loan. Hence the abusive practices, like charging usurious rates and then raising rates even further (often without notice and sometimes retroactively) because of a missed payment, that the current credit card reform bill has attempted to ban. Because customs who default, pinned down by the credit card industry's very own bought-and-paid-for "Bankruptcy Reform", can be fleeced at will with penalties and other surcharges with little or no recourse.

So yeah. Many consumers were foolish. But there is plenty of blame to go around here.

selected "for their readiness to discard the rule of law whenever emotion moves them,"

As opposed to being moved by conservative politics. That's a perfectly OK reason to discard the rule of law, isn't it? Bush v. Gore is probably one of the lowest points in the history of the Supreme Court (after Dred Scott, Plessy v. Fergusson, and Korematsu v. United States) and that's saying something. It is so shameful that the embarrassed majority (some of whom still sit on this court and are icons of the Right: Kennedy, Scalia and Thomas) admonished that that decision was not to be used as a precedent.

I'd rate this decision as one of the Right's top 5 abuses of power in the last 9 years. So obviously the Right would like to see more "impartial", "unemotional" jurists like the 3 still on the Court who voted in the majority of that shameful case.