HEALTH-CARE SMACKDOWN - OR, WE REPORT, YOU DECIDE: Ted Barlow advocates a single-payer system for the U.S. His arguments are blasted by Megan McArdle at great length (and it spills over into the comments on that post.) It seems to me that even if Barlow's arguments are right, they ignore the collateral costs described by McArdle.
A different idea for health-care reinvention was outlined a couple of years ago by Matthew Miller in this Atlantic article. Miller essentially proposed ending the market-distorting tax exemption for health insurance with vouchers generous enough to enable individuals to buy good insurance policies. I am not sure how Miller's proposed system would provide a voucher that was generous enough without giving insurance companies the ability to jack their costs up on the government's tab. (For an analogy, the availability of government aid for college has enabled colleges to charge more tuition than they otherwise would have. That's not an argument that such aid should not exist, but it is an argument that the benefits of such aid are more limited than they appear.)