Nor are they eager to tar the vast array of government hospitals and clinics that serve our nation’s veterans. For one thing, the veterans’ hospitals, once considered a second-rate backwater, now lead their private sector competitors in adopting electronic medical records and score well for delivering high quality care at relatively low cost. Even when the veterans’ hospitals were rightly criticized this year for their part in the disgraceful failure to care adequately for soldiers injured in Iraq and Afghanistan, there was no clamor to junk or privatize the system, only demands to make it better.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg startled most New Yorkers two years ago when he asserted that the city’s public hospitals are “better than the great teaching hospitals” all around them. Although some deemed his praise hyperbolic, the city’s billionaire, entrepreneurial, free-market-enriched mayor thought he knew quality when he saw it, even if it was socialist at its core.

The country’s vast Medicare program is one step less socialized — a “single-payer” program in which the government pays for the care and sets reimbursement rates, but the actual care is delivered by private doctors and hospitals. When Medicare was launched in 1965 it was routinely denounced as socialized medicine, but it has become so popular that politicians deem it the third rail of American politics, sure to electrocute anyone who tries to cut it or privatize it. No politician is eager to brand 43 million beneficiaries as socialists at heart.

Meanwhile, the two current butts of the “s-word” are such hybrids of public and private elements that it is hard to know how to characterize them. The State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or S-chip, was denigrated by one Republican congressman this week as “a government-run socialized wolf masquerading in the sheep skin of children’s health.” It might better be thought of as a “double-payer system” in which the states and the federal government put up the money, the states take the lead in defining the program and the actual care is typically delivered through private health plans by private doctors and hospitals.

The “s-word” seems even less appropriate for Senator Clinton’s proposed universal health care plan, which seeks to bolster employer-provided health benefits and create new purchasing pools to help individuals buy private policies at low group rates.