I work with a guy whom I shall call Mike the Mad Russian. Mike grew up under the Soviet Union (until high-school age), so he has some insight into how things worked there.
We were discussing socialized medicine the other day. I made the comment that fewer people would want to be doctors if the US moves to socialized medicine. He replied that that wasn't true, that enough people still wanted to be a doctor in the Soviet Union that there was a lot of competition for those educational slots. Stumped I was, until it occurred to me what the flaw in his counterexample was.
In the Soviet Union, every job was socialized. Being a doctor probably brought with it certain liberties that other jobs didn't, even though there were higher-paying jobs. In the US, if medicine is socialized, there will still be other jobs open that won't be socialized. There will still be incentives for people who might otherwise have been doctors to go off and do other things.
(Of course, someone is about to come along and point out the flaw in my counterargument. But, hel, if you never make mistakes, you never learn anything.)
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