Seems ironic to me that a person calling themselves "advancedathiest" would come forth in defense of such a primitive notion as socialized healthcare (No comment on my name, I just thought it was funny). Allow me to correct a few of your points;
One, Americans pay twice as much for healthcare as the people in other developed democratic countries with universal health insurance, but we generally poorer health outcomes. If anything, cutting out the parasitic insurance companies would tend to lower costs.
There are specific reasons why healthcare costs in the US are out of control, and the only thing that can fix them is the market. Get government out of healthcare. Insurance companies currently do not have the ability to screen consumers as they should, and are forced to include services in their policies that most of us don't need. This forces insurance companies to charge everyone more for insurance. This is similar to the effect of minimum wages, which force employers to overpay employees, and thus hire less people; it deprives people of resources that would otherwise be available. The FDA plays a role in inflating the costs of drugs and services too. On top of this we have allowed malpractice lawsuits to spin out of control causing insurance rates for practitioners to increase dramatically. One possible solution to this problem that I intend to research further is a 'loser-pays' system, which may prevent a considerable amount of fraud.
Two, most of the healthcare we consume doesn't do us much good any way. Robin Hanson has written about tis extensively, including the fact that you have a nontrivial chance of dying in an American hospital today from medical errors. If physicians did a lot less for us, we would hardly notice the difference.
This is an argument in defense of socialized healthcare? Try taking a look at any other government bureaucracy and tell me again how socialized medicine will be more efficient or effective. This would be a good argument in favor of Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), which I think would be the norm once the state stops dictating how insurance companies operate. Most people don't need HMOs and PPOs, there actual costs would be much less than the premiums. What would benefit people, both insured and uninsured, is to have a catastrophic policy in place to guard against disaster, and then to have a spend either out of pocket or out of an HSA for all of their ordinary costs. Even with other current obstacles that I mentioned in the way this would still force healthcare providers to compete with each other to offer lower prices.
And three, don't you think people in developed democratic countries with universal health insurance go to work every day? By cutting healthcare loose from employment, people don't have to stick to suboptimal jobs they feel they need to keep just for the company-provided health insurance; instead they can find jobs more in line with their interests and abilities, which tends to increase overall productivity.
Healthcare shouldn't be and doesn't need to be tied to employment.
Libertarians who spout this kind of rhetoric suffer from an irrational bias that WAY overestimates their individual "productivity" and self-reliance. You benefit more than you realize from generational pay-it-forward systems like Social Security and Medicare, where the taxes you pay now buy you claims to benefits when your health eventually crashes. I don't feel put upon in the least that both my parents and (until recently) three of my grandparents draw Social Security and Medicare benefits.
I don't feel the least sympathy for someone who either underestimates or undervalues their own right to be an individual. If you don't wish to have the responsibility of being alive and of having responsibility for your own life than you can give up entirely and move to Cuba. I have not benefited at all from such systems, and I don't intend to.
As for the alleged inferiority of government programs, you see that sort of thing when you put people into government (like most Republicans) who don't want government to work any way.
The politicians we vote on may establish a bureaucracy, but once it is place it is self-sustaining and almost impervious to outside influences. The FDA is a good example of this; it has grown like a tumor and now the scope of its powers reach far beyond what it was originally intended for.
Unfortunately few people are willing to take the time to understand the actual reasons why there is a healthcare crisis. They mistakenly attribute the problem to the system that is struggling to operate under the bloated hand of government. They fail to see that this hand is not helping, as it claims to be, but slowly crushing the system and our freedoms along with it.