I see a lot of conflating of concepts in this thread, as if democracy equals capitalism.
The discussion of socialized health care is a question of economic theory. A given country may have a democracy, republic, kingdom, etc. and have a communist economy.
Similarly, one may have a unicameral government, authoritarian state, dictatatorship, and so forth, with a capitalist economy that allows private ownership. Witness China.
In my opinion, any government that embraces either whole communism or capitalism sells out its constituents. Both of these systems are the product of the Enlightenment, and both empower the elitist few, and a secularized, materialistic, mechanistic society.
This is why I support distributionism over either system, as only it predicates economic control upon broadly practiced private ownership and local control. The Catholic Church is wise in teaching such an economic system, because it stands against globalisation, and the control of our government by powerful banks and corporations, who command huge portions of our economy.
So all this talk about which government is best is beside the point. When President Woodrow Wilson assented to the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, he effectively sold our rights to a group of private banks, by ensuring the indebtedness of all U.S. citizens to a handful of powerful capitalists. R.I.P. American democracy.
