Ben Levi, regarding health insurance, the systems vary significantly by country, but in general, the data I’ve seen shows that citizens of countries with universal health care are much happier with their health care in practice than in countries like the US where we don’t have that. In fact, though, the US has universal “socialist” health care (the Veterans Administration, in which all the doctors and nurses and such are federal employees), and Canada-style single-payer insurance (Medicare) — they just don’t apply to everyone. Medicare, and especially the VA, get high marks for their quality of coverage and people seem pretty happy with them. So it depends on how it’s done.
I don’t think it’s the case that European welfare states are failing and dragging the world down with them (though austerity politics pushed by the Germans seems to be bad, it is unrelated to the general concept of a left-wing approach to social policy.) In the last few years the major western European economies aren’t doing any worse than the US. Greece is certainly a problem, but that had more to do with corruption and incompetence than the European model — for example, Greece has very low levels of social protection, among the lowest in Europe. Analysts have different views, but it seems that the main cause of the global financial crisis was US financial deregulation (a right wing policy in an economically right wing country), which allowed people to create absurdly confusing and overvalued securities based on mortgages and then fool most of the major banks into buying them all as if they were a stable investment.