One thing I should make clear- right now what we have here is really neither a socialized medicine nor free market healthcare. We have a chimera of the worst from each, and it just hurts everyone. I simply do not believe that socialized medicine is the better solution because it still has the problem: a bureaucrat makes the decision on whether to provide coverage or not with *your* money.
No matter the system, somebody makes the decision on what gets covered and what doesn't. Right now, the people who make that decision regard any money spent actually providing medical care as a "loss". Their whole objective is to NOT give people medical care. With some future alternative system, one woule hope that those decisions would be made with the actual health of the patient in mind, rather than the health of someone's profit margin.
It's easy to say that we should take out profit motive, but I already pointed out that the resources to provide medical care are scarce, and always will be. There's no free lunch, and forcing insurance to cover everyone isn't going to magically make more resource available for everyone. I'd rather put my faith in invisible hand of the market to allocate the scarce resource than in some faceless bureaucrat, whether he works for a for-profit company or for the government, to rubber-stamp my claim.
In an absolute sense, yes, resources to provide anything are scarce. But I don't think they are so scarce that covering everyone would lead to some sort of horrific rationing of care. I agree that mandating the insurance companies to cover everyone won't help. But I don't think that "the free hand of the market" will allocate reousrces effectively. The force that moves the free hand of the market is money, and we have already seen the effects of rationing care by ability to pay: Our tax dollars pay for the poor to get care, the rich can afford fabulous care, and the rest of us tax payers get either no care or mediochre care, depending on what we can afford.
Think about it this way, when your house is on fire, does the fire department ask whether you can afford their services before they come put out the fire? Do the police ask what your "police insurance plan" is before they take your report of robbery? Does the public school make you sign a payment plan before they agree to educate your child? Do you have to pay the cement man when he comes to fix a pothole on the street in front of your house? When your drinking water is dirty, do you have to go build your own water treatment plant? These are all examples of where we collectively spend our tax money to provide services that benefit everyone. In some cases, it really is more efficient to pay for big things with our tax dollars than individually.
That is how I think of medical care. There should be some bottom line where everyone can recieve a basic level of medical care, so that people are not dying because of the simple fact that they can't afford to go to the doctor.