More particularly, they seriously overestimate how much of a difference would be made, and fail to appreciate just how impossible it is to fundamentally change a behemoth like the current American health care system - Medicare, the insurance companies, etc. Especially when you haven't got political consensus on how to change it.

They just figure that clearly the American system is significantly inferior to theirs, and that anything that'll bring the American system closer to the European systems is probably a good thing. By which, I'll grant you, they quite probably overestimate Congress.

But the current health insurance system is spending fortunes on lobbying and unproductive rent-seeking as well. Your government may be more tainted by lobbyism and cronyism than other governments, but that is doubly true for your health insurance industry.

I guess as usual in politics, the problems are all interconnected, and you can't really solve them all apart. But it would almost seem like the originally sound but now quite exaggerated American mistrust of government in general has, rather ironically, led to more lobbyism, cronyism and other government inefficiencies than in other countries, precisely because people distrust government and don't expect it to be efficient anyway. Put in other words, power may be inherently corrupting, but that doesn't mean Congress could not or should not do better than this.