In the world of abstract Republican theory, it's definitionally a bad idea to have government involved in healthcare, just as government involvement in anything is a bad idea. When your patron saint has declared, as a matter of official religious dogma, that government is the problem, orthodoxy requires that you conclude that government shouldn't be involved in healthcare, regardless of any real-world evidence to the contrary.
However, for those of us who judge based on evidence, the real world has spoken quite plainly. In every other wealthy nation on Earth, government has far more involvement in healthcare than here. They all have universal coverage, and a more or less socialized system. The results are in. Not only do they all pay about half as much for healthcare than America, per capita, they have better results to show for it. They live longer, have lower infant mortality, lower incidence rates of most preventable diseases, fewer social/medical epidemics (STDs, teen pregnancy, obesity, and crime.), and so on.
Moreover, there's no particular reason to think that America is some strange exception to the general rule -- that somehow the basic formula that succeeded in so many other places would fail here. There's no reason, in other words, to think that there's something so deeply fundamentally wrong with America, at its core, or so profoundly inferior about Americans, as people, that we can't run our healthcare system as cheaply and effectively as French people run theirs. After all, we already have socialized medical systems in this country, and they work well. I was born and raised in one: the extremely socialized military system -- where the government directly builds the hospitals, employs the doctors, and buys the drugs. It's a great system, and if anyone were to argue that we should take this away from our troops, and throw them to the mercy of our incompetent private market system of medicine, people like Gingrich would scream bloody murder. Then there's Medicare: a highly cost-effective program that's so wildly popular that calling for its privatization would be political suicide.
So, we know that, IN REALITY, socialized systems have been proven to work quite well, in a couple dozen other wealthy nations, and even here in the United States. The only question is whether you care about Facta (the real-world evidence), or Verba (the hymnal of faith-based conservative rhetoric from which Gingrich reads).
The real quotation from Ronald Reagan was "facts are stupid things." It was a bit of a Freudian slip, and summarizes the true outlook of Reagan and Gingrich, so fond of their alternate Republican reality that the intrusion of facts is unwelcome. The real-world facts that you, and their kind, have got to come to terms with is the long-standing track record of socialized medicine costing half as much and producing better results than our system. That's Facta, not Verba.
