Former CBO director June O’Neill and Dave O’Neill have a working paper comparing health outcomes in the semi-socialized U.S. health care sector and the fully socialized Canadian Medicare system. From the abstract:

Does Canada’s publicly funded, single payer health care system deliver better health outcomes and distribute health resources more equitably than the multi-payer heavily private U.S. system? We show that the efficacy of health care systems cannot be usefully evaluated by comparisons of infant mortality and life expectancy. We analyze several alternative measures of health status… We find a somewhat higher incidence of chronic health conditions in the U.S. than in Canada but somewhat greater U.S. access to treatment for these conditions. Moreover, a significantly higher percentage of U.S. women and men are screened for major forms of cancer. Although health status, measured in various ways is similar in both countries, mortality/​incidence ratios for various cancers tend to be higher in Canada… We also find that Canada has no more abolished the tendency for health status to improve with income than have other countries. Indeed, the health-income gradient is slightly steeper in Canada than it is in the U.S.

There’s also this interesting observation from their concluding comments:

The need to ration when care is delivered “free” ultimately leads to long waits or unavailable services and to unmet needs. In the U.S. costs are more often a source of unmet needs. But costs may be more easily overcome than the absence of services. When asked about satisfaction with health services and the ranking of the quality of services recently received, more U.S. residents than Canadians respond that they are fully satisfied and rank quality of care as excellent.

And this crucial caveat:

One important issue that we do not address concerns the large differential in per capita health care expenditures which are about twice as large in the U.S. Is the U.S. getting sufficient additional benefits to justify these greater expenditures and where should we cut back if cutbacks must be made? Alternatively, what would Canada have to spend to increase their technical capital and specialized medical personnel to match American levels or to eliminate the longer waiting times? And would it be worthwhile to them to do so? To answer these questions more research is needed…