No, it's not. Or at least not necessarily. Here in Norway all doctor offices and public hospitals are independently operated at some level (there are hospital regions though). We are however in the process of introducing a shared journal system which will result in all of these providers sharing information about patients. This information sharing is also something that can be done in fully privatised (aka uncivilised) systems such as in the USA, so it's not really a trait of public healthcare system. But while sharing the information has a lot of benefits, there is as you mentions huge risks with data breaches as data will be sent around. And something we have been discussing here in Norway recently due to a few outsourcing as well as software data access issues. But nothing compare to this case in Sweden.

> i guess the difference is optical: instead of blaming the evil corporations, we'll blame the evil government.

No, that's a huge difference mate.