What would happen if government took over health care, and created one of the largest bureaucracies in the world?

Absolute failure.

The UK Telegraph explains:

One million patients a week cannot get appointments with GPs, amid the longest waiting times on record, new figures show.

[…]The NHS figures show the number waiting at least a week to see their GP has risen by 56 per cent in five years, with one in five now waiting this long.

The pressures left 11.3 per cent of patients unable to get an appointment at all – a 27 per cent rise since 2012.  This amounts to around 47 million occasions on which patients attempted but failed to secure help from their GP, forcing them to give up, try again later or turn to Accident & Emergency departments.

Rising numbers of patients struggled to even get through on the phone, with 27.8 per cent of those polled citing difficulties, compared with 18.5 per cent in 2012.

[…]The survey of more than 800,000 patients – which is held annually – found worsening access to family doctors across a range of measures.

GPs said the NHS was “at breaking point” with patients increasingly giving up their search for help, even though their health was deteriorating.

But, I am often told by socialists that American health care is just terrible compared to government-run health care systems in other countries. After all, who gives you better service? Private companies in a free market, like Amazon.com? Or government-run monopolies, like the Bureau of Motor Vehicles?

Let’s take a look at this analysis by a medical doctor who is also a Stanford University professor:

Fact No. 1:  Americans have better survival rates than Europeans for common cancers.[1]  Breast cancer mortality is 52 percent higher in Germany than in the United States, and 88 percent higher in the United Kingdom.  Prostate cancer mortality is 604 percent higher in the U.K. and 457 percent higher in Norway.  The mortality rate for colorectal cancer among British men and women is about 40 percent higher.

Fact No. 6:  Americans spend less time waiting for care than patients in Canada and the U.K.  Canadian and British patients wait about twice as long – sometimes more than a year – to see a specialist, to have elective surgery like hip replacements or to get radiation treatment for cancer.[6]  All told, 827,429 people are waiting for some type of procedure in Canada.[7]  In England, nearly 1.8 million people are waiting for a hospital admission or outpatient treatment.[8]

Fact No. 9:  Americans have much better access to important new technologies like medical imaging than patients in Canada or the U.K.  Maligned as a waste by economists and policymakers naïve to actual medical practice, an overwhelming majority of leading American physicians identified computerized tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as the most important medical innovations for improving patient care during the previous decade.[11]  [See the table.]  The United States has 34 CT scanners per million Americans, compared to 12 in Canada and eight in Britain.  The United States has nearly 27 MRI machines per million compared to about 6 per million in Canada and Britain.[12]

UK taxpayers pay a lot more in taxes than Americans do. Is it worth it?

Honestly, who would you rather have running your health care? Doctors or unionized government workers who never passed high school arithmetic? The free market is best.