No one dies in front of a hospital in the USA because they can't pay. Both Medicaid for the poor and Medicare for the old are funded with hundreds of billions of dollars to ensure that doesn't happen. The USA actually has more hospital beds per capita than Canada, even though it has a much larger population. If the American Medical Association of physicians wanted socialized medicine in the USA we would have it tomorrow, but being the best paid doctors in the world, they don't. US nurses are the best paid too.

Elected officials are not the only people in government by a long shot. There 1.8M federal workers and most of them are civilians, and 19.7 million workers in state and municipal government. If you think that some sort of civil service reform is neccessary, to make the governments work better, you should mention it. As far as elected officials go, we are stuck with the people who are willing to take the time and effort and have the ego to run for office, even though they will probably lose in the primary. That's the problem in every democracy.