All financial institutions to be run by the federal government.

[famousringo]

HappySqurriel said:

 

Healthcare is a different beast than education ... The vast majority of healthcare costs are associated with preventable illness and bureaucracy (regardless of who provides the service), and the growth in costs over the past 60 years have motsly been related to the cost of delivering better healthcare to people (better diagnosis, treatment and an ability to treat more diseases). Until our mindset on health changes, and we can control the costs, we're on a path where healthcare will be unaffordable or unavialable to people regardless of who provides the services.

While there are certainly challenges which threaten the long-term viability of all health care systems, there's strong evidence that single-payer health systems are less threatened than the mostly-private health insurance system of the United States. Here's a study which found that bureaucratic costs are far lower in Canada than they are in the United States:

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/349/8/768

"In 1999, health administration costs totaled at least $294.3 billion in the United States, or $1,059 per capita, as compared with $307 per capita in Canada. After exclusions, administration accounted for 31.0 percent of health care expenditures in the United States and 16.7 percent of health care expenditures in Canada. Canada's national health insurance program had overhead of 1.3 percent; the overhead among Canada's private insurers was higher than that in the United States (13.2 percent vs. 11.7 percent). Providers' administrative costs were far lower in Canada."

I'm afraid that I don't have any hard evidence that a single-payer system is more efficient at delivering preventive care, though there are theories that single-payer systems improve preventive care by reducing the financial barriers to people going in to get a minor problem checked out, rather than waiting until it becomes a serious problem in order to save the cost of a visit to the doctor.

One last curiousity on health care. The United States  government actually spends more on health as a share of GDP than the government of Canada does, while private US health expenditures are three times as high.

PS, NationMaster.com is an awesome, awesome site for info-porn addicts like me.