I have to agree. For-profit health insurance has a built-in conflict of interest. It's all about maximizing profit and minimizing loss so there is a very strong incentive to deny claims and provide the cheapest possible treatments. That's in direct conflict with maximizing patient care and good outcomes.
I was recently in Cuba, and something that struck me is many of the buildings are crumbling and collapsing. When it comes down to it, the real reason is self policing never works.
You see, they built the rain gutters within the walls of the buildings directly connecting to the sewers. Aesthetically very nice, unless you don't perform regular maintenance, then they get clogged, crack, water seeps into the wall, erosion takes over and so on.
Since the government took over in 59, no real maintenance has taken place, no self policing is happening and now a new building collapses every 3 or 4 months.
Regardless if a private industry says it can self police or if the government takes over and says it can self-police, you should be worried.
This is the same reason why the recent NYC free-lancers law made me laugh. Essentially, now, if you bill a client in NYC and they don't pay within 30 days, you can sue them for it along with reasonable legal fees. First off, if you conducted business properly, you would not run into situation enough for it to matter. Second, I did a project for the city and it took over 90 days to get paid; does this law not apply to them?
Anyway, if government takes over health care, we will need to rely on self policing by the government on the government. I can't say this will lead to problems, but history surely suggests it would.
Having a private industry being policed by government always seems to be the better alternative. It's just a question of how intense should the policing be.