The restriction would be the huge cost. I'm pretty certain individual doctors, unless they banded together to form their own cooperatives, could never come up with the financing to have all the modern devices.

Private hospitals could certainly exist but why would patients except the extremely wealthy use them if they had to pay out of their own pockets for the care? My thought is the governmental single-payer system would buy up care centers and staff them with physicians contracted through that system. Those facilities would have the MRI equipment, the high tech labs, the latest in technology. It would make sense for doctors wanting to not contract with the governmental system to rent use of those areas for their own practice instead of having to make the huge equipment purchases themselves. However, if they wanted to bite the bullet and had enough wealthy clients to help fund their own centers, why not? It's not like a socialized system is ever going to prevent the wealthy from supplementing their own care and I see no reason why there should be any attempt to do so.

What I think you'd see though is those private institutions having to cut their costs dramatically to be able to draw people out of the public system. Just as we now have alternatives to using the public mail system through highly competitive companies like UPS and FedEx why couldn't low cost alternative health care options develop along with the governmental health system? It's ironic but I can foresee a social system actually working for the best interest of free enterprise and the consumer.

Art