It's a profit center whether you like it or not, with or without the government. With the government the profit goes into the bureaucracy.
The medicare + medicaid system has shown itself to be an extreme profit center for government employees and the bureaucracy. They take home massive sums in profit: wages and pensions.
The government doesn't make the system more efficient by reducing profit from the equation. They reduce cost by reducing care options, reducing salaries for healthcare workers, and rationing. For example, nurses in America make 50% more than nurses in Germany. Socialized medicine will decimate that pay variance.
There's nothing on earth more wasteful than government when it comes to spending money. Just ask the US government system (fed+state+local), it's a $7 trillion per year profit system, that flows directly into the hands of millions of employees that make on average $100k per year in wages + benefits, with that pay package doubling in size in just the last ten years, while the economy flat lined.
How do you explain the low costs and relative success internationally of the NHS (in the UK)?
I've no problem with a free market approach to healthcare when it works. But it seems hypocritical to criticise our approach for involving too much government intervention (something which supposedly reduces efficiency) as not being suitable for the US when it's more efficient than the current US system.
It is good to have highly paid nurses if it correlates with other good factors, else it is good for nurses but pointless for the general public, or even bad if it means the latter is being ripped off and the costs are absurdly high compared to other countries.
As long as healthcare is a profit center, you will only have the right to die quietly if you cannot afford it in America.