[arp242]

This is the problem when people talk about "socialism", "capitalism", "free market", and these kind of terms. Almost every country on the planet today has some elements of that – barring some extreme outliers – with all sorts of different different implementations and restrictions.

Talking about these concepts in broad general strokes is worse than useless; it just muddles things. Talk about health care, or social security, or specific free market issues, or specific things like that instead.

Medicare is "socialism" and popular; it was already instituted in 1973 (when this article was written). The American people had already "chosen socialism", just not the extreme version the author seems to implicitly assume.