Of course, even in most socialized systems, people pay certain sums directly for their own healthcare - you don't want to encourage people going to the doctor constantly for nothing, it's not a good idea to make it entirely "free".

But there are several reasons why socalized healthcare makes sense while doing the same with food or housing doesn't. First and foremost among those, the fact that food and housing are things you need constantly, whereas healthcare is something you need at highly irregular times, but then it can suddenly be an enormous cost. Even if you're a responsible person who saves money for rainy days, health problems can wipe out your savings and make you bankrupt - even the right in the US acknowledges that and wants to avoid those situations. Due to that, it becomes advantageous to set up a system where you pool all those risks, sharing both the costs and the payouts among large amounts of people. That's just the essence of the entire insurance industry. Of course, you can do that through private insurers, but unless you do that with far-reaching regulations, they'll just find ways to increase their profits by avoiding the high-risk patients, and in so doing largely excluding some people from the benefits of the system. And I don't think I need to repeat those figures about how large a percentage of GDP the US spends on healthcare with its private system, compared to the countries with socialized healthcare. It works, evidently (yeah, abrupt ending, I kinda have to be off to class now ).