Does Public Disease Call for Nationalized Remedies?

Internautes,
The health records of the world leave little doubt of two facts; first basic sanitation and access to lifestyle improvements have done more for the health (including the longevity) of world citizens than all applicable knowledge of biology thus far, and it is arguable that neither further medicine nor human engineering can ever replace the essentials. Second, the United States is dead last in the industrialized world in providing opportunities for lifestyle improvements. While the record can never budge us from the correlation of poor lifestyle-improvement opportunities with the poor public health/preventative medicine outcome for America if we wish to blame lazy Americans who have had everything too good for their own bad health, but the correlations are there to suggest heavily not only the obvious importance of lifestyle, but the contribution of relative prices of healthy and unhealthy food, availability of healthy food altogether, urban design, transportation policy, etc. to the relative health of nations.
This is public health or health economics 101.
What is more frequently missed is what all this means to health-care policy. When one method is more important than another in achieving results, it makes correlatory statistics, from everyday mental comparison tests to the fanciest of regressions, looking at the effect of the second and less important variable on the outcome while ignoring the first all but bunk. In the case of regressions, the omitted variables are in this case exceedingly unlikely to be uncorrelated to the included ones. The regions of the United States or Europe with better preventative care, for instance, are almost certainly the ones with more effective medicine; there are legal and political reasons why this should be so within the blocs but not between them. All of which means that to say that the proposition that European nationalized healthcare systems have proven themselves by the health outcomes they achieve against the American system is bunk simply beacuse that they're not the achievers here at all. The European lifestyle and incentives to lead it are what we ought to be imitating. Starting by explicit health-care is all but insane: the United States has the best curative medicine in the world, if also the most expensive. While some are excluded from the system, the majority of people get what the nation pays for. It is a question of value whether one gives more importance to the total quality-weighed amount of curative medicine in the country, or gives more importance to the basics being broadly provided. Especially given the diminishing marginal returns of care to any one individual, there is much to be said for the second position. But it is a matter of fact that the best available care in the United States is the best available care anywhere, that the United States is the leader in medical research and actually subsidizes the rest of the world in the arena of prescription medicine (a highly atypical but real situation). It is also a highly likely conjecture that the continued incentives to produce medical goods in the United States could give this country the advantage in next-generation biological technologies; an advantage we seem to now lack in just about everything else, and consequently need desperately.
The state of the nation's health is an outrage that calls for public health solutions, not nationalized medicine whose results are not what they appear to be if one ignores this crucial causative factor. A serious healthy urban planning, healthy food incentive-creating program together with more innovative approaches to improving lifestyle would of course drastically reduce insanely rising health-care costs far more effectively than Hillary Clinton's proposal to create a monospomy (buyer-side monopoly, which reduces costs) of health-care or Barack Obama's unthought compromise plan, which includes elements from so many sources the likely economic result is presently undecipherable. Why is no one telling the public any of this? We live in a republic, not a democracy, not so we may elect pop-stars to embody our ideal selves but so that those who thought most about a question are in a position to present it to those who have thought less and have them ratify the leaders who listen to the best advisers. The hope of republican forms of government is that the people's reasoning about candidates' debate correspond or map unto the actual complicated policy questions, of which no one has a grasp of all. Each person trying to decide the issues all for themselves adds up to a highly repetitive crystal matrix of dunces projecting a largely grey image on the screen of governmental decision. The citizens of a republic each contribute a different facet to the image on the screen; the members of a mob, each in his own isolated world, all do more or less the same thing, creating an additive, rather than a transformative, aggregate.
Obama and company have perverted a common-sense but already flawed logical imperative to judge things by their results into a nonsensical injunction to compare systems by their late surfaces; which is precisely what the Madisonian republican form of government is supposed to prevent.

So why does Europe have nationalized health-care whereas we do not? It is a complicated question involving historical accident, selection of citizens by mentality in the era of mass migration, two world wars, and many other factors of which I am but hazily aware. None of them however means that Europe's medical system works better than ours. Europe's public health system is what's doing that work. Perhaps American medicine is still what it is because it is the only remedy to our lifestyle, or perhaps it is a flawed system that could use improvement. But no such ammendations will have the massive consequences that the candidates believe they will have.

I am all for public works projects. But the candidates have agreed upon the wrong starting point by which to orient the rest of the picture through a presumed future policy process.