Health care only works "better" when socialized if you believe that health care really should be so expensive that they have to print extra money explicitly to pay for it. There's no reason that has to be an integral property of health care. Turns out that most of the time, we don't need hospitals the size of college campuses (incidentally another thing that is completely unaffordable). The reason things cost so much is because true costs are obscured, just as they would be in a socialized system, by insurance.

IMO non-catastrophic insurance should be abolished, the government should overcome the supply chain cycle ("Sorry, I have to charge $500 for this MRI because this machine cost me $4 million") by producing its own functional medical equipment and selling it at or under cost, and health providers need to get back to reality and charge face rates that real people can pay directly. And we all need to come to terms with the fact that some of the extravagance probably needs to be toned down.

"Turns out that most of the time, we don't need hospitals the size of college campuses (incidentally another thing that is completely unaffordable)."

However people are not willing to accept the consequences of hospitals that can't surge in catastrophes. When an EF-5 tornado hit my city 3 years ago, it took out one of our two hospital complexes. Things got ... rather intense at the other (http://stormdoctor.blogspot.com/2011/06/first-response-mode-...) but it being big, and stocked with otherwise excess inventory of all sorts of things, kept the death toll at ~160 instead of a likely 1,000 or so.