My view of the main con of universal healthcare systems is that it's harder to get care for chronic conditions that are unpleasant/painful but not ultimately dangerous. I think it's hard to dispute that the US offers substantially better care for these issues if you have the money.
The fact is, though, that I believe this is the case largely because of how doctors are allocated. Doctors are, of course, a limited resource - there's simply an insufficient number of people with the requisite intelligence, mindset and dedication necessary to do the job. In universal healthcare systems, doctors are allocated largely by need first, whereas in the US the system is biased substantially by ability to pay. Personally I find that dubiously moral, but I think perhaps it fits well with the US mindset - it's been my experience that the poor are judged quite harshly there, and not necessarily seen as deserving of good care.
(a quite sidenote here - I often see people essentially saying 'if they want healthcare they should be more successful'. I don't really understand this point of view, because since healthcare is largely a limited resource, as people earn more money the cost of healthcare will go up with their ability to pay. No matter how hard everyone tries, there will always be a bottom percentage who get poor care)
> Nobody likes monopolies, yet those same people are fine with the government running one. The same exact rules apply. A monopoly on health care means the government doesn't have to compete, innovate, or have any incentive to give us better care.
The same rules do not apply if you have a functioning government - in principle if a government produces poor results with respect to public services, you kick them out and vote in a replacement, something you can't do (without monopoly regulation) to a private company. This happened when the Tory government got junked in favour of Labour in the 90s. Labour, for all their (many) other faults, saved the NHS and helped turned it into the highly efficient system we have today. Is it perfect? No, but it's much better than most alternatives.
> They may not be looking to "rip off desperate people", but they sure don't know how to efficiently spend money (example: every single government-run system in the history of humanity)
I see this meme spread a lot, yet the UK's publicly-run system indisputably achieves better overall results for the amount of money put in than the US's private one.