That's not socialism, that's a country with social services.
I've seen multiple time when people from Scandinavia were offended when their country was called "socialist" - they are not. The economy is capitalist but the country offers strong social services.
Another funny thing - when reading about the us you realizer that it's just a broken market and snowballed problems. For example - the government invests more than any other country (per capita) in the health sector. The thing is it got out of hand.
It's a broken market because it's a rigged market. For all my endless harping, I don't think capitalism is pure evil. I think crony capitalism, and I believe that is what it means when we talk about "late stage capitalism," certain winners are allowed to buy the rule makers, which concentrates wealth, which allows more spending on rule makers, etc etc.
If we had guardrails, capitalism could do what it's supposed to - See a need/want, meet that need/want, make a reasonable amount of money which gets spent on other needs/wants.
I remember watching an economic professor saying that we will never achieve pure capitalism because it's just to measure how far we are into the capitalism. Maybe that also goes with socialism.
And I wouldn't say communism achieved worse outcomes. Countries adopting some form of communist ideology experienced some of the most rapid increases in industrialization, QoL, and education. They weren't perfect, but they definitely didn't drag everyone down to the previous minimum.
Most of the communist regimes people use as examples rose to power at a point in history when new technologies and industrialization were having a huge impact on the way people lived.
A mix of capitalism and socialism that made a point of educating and upskilling their population would have achieved the same goal without the brutal massacre of a chunk of their population.
One of the big problems with communism is that economic prosperity is framed fundamentally as a zero sum game. When that's a foundational axiom of the system you build you wind up not building systems of growth, only of redistribution. It has rippling effects throughout the culture and the philosophy of a nation that attempts it.