Well, at least the bureaucratic inefficiencies are entirely incidental to the problem, and there's no evidence for corporate bureaucracies to be any better than public ones, so that factor... doesn't factor.
This claim is disputed, but I have negligible information either way.
As for the higher taxes... how much are you ready to pay so that, the day you catch some horrible disease, the public entity will be able to afford diverting enough of its resources to save you? What are you more afraid of, cancer and other potentially-fatal diseases that will eventually kill you, terrorism/invading armies/criminals/people trying to kill you, boredom...?
Personally, I say that universal health care would be worth the higher taxes. For any given person the answer depends on their utility function: the relative values assigned to freedom, avoidance of harm, happiness, life, fairness,etc.
... Actually that might be a neat reform. Budget decision by a combination of individual budget assignments by every citizen...
This sets off my Really Bad Idea alarm. I don't trust the aggregate decisions of individual citizens to add up to any kind of sane budget relative to their CEV. (Note: the following sentences are American-centric.) Probably research would get massively under-funded. Defense would probably be funded less than it is now, but that might well put it closer to the optimal value if it forced some cost-effectiveness increases.
Basically, each person would assign all their taxes to whatever they thought was most important, thus prioritizing programs according to how many people pick them as first choice, regardless of how many dollars it takes to make a given one work. The same kind of math used to discuss different voting/electoral college variants would inform this, I think, but I'm too lazy to look it up. And of course, if too much freedom was allowed in deciding, all companies and most people would decide to allocate their money to themselves.
universal health care
What does this mean? In particular, what does "universal" mean?
Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules: