You're assuming that the US govt can efficiently provide services. (Its payment systems can cut a check cheaply, which is what the "Medicare overhead" numbers measure, but can be susceptible to fraud. Note that despite rampant fraud, it's harder to win a dispute with Medicare than it is with private insurers.)

The US govt currently spends more per resident than EU countries do on healthcare yet manages to cover a much smaller fraction of the population.

That's why I wanted to give Obama free rein over existing govt healthcare, including all govt employees (state and local too), and maybe even employees of companies that get >80% of their revenues from govt contracts.

That works out to well over twice EU spending (per capita) on covered folk. Since the promise of govt healthcare is cheaper and better, in years 2-4, we cut the per-capita budget by 5% (which is a bit over 20%, or less than the 30% savings promised by single payer advocates). At the end of that time, we'll know whether the US govt can provide healthcare.

After all, it doesn't matter whether other contries can do it, it matters whether the US govt can do it.

If they can do it, we can do it too. The reasons that we're so bad at it now are because we're doing it wrong because so many people are opposed to the very notion of socialism. But I understand your wanting them to prove it first by ramping up slowly.

Actually, no, not for useful values of "can do it".

Consider Microsoft and Google. Microsoft has lots of smart people, but Google can do things that Microsoft can't.

Yes, Microsoft is capable of doing those, but in some very real sense, it can't.

It's sort of like Bill Gates' phone number. I know it in some sense (4 digits of area code, 3 digits of prefix, and then 4 more digitis), but not in any useful sense.