That is what I have been thinking all these years, too. However, watching the horrible privatization schemes of public utilities and (in particular) health care here in Europe the last years, I am not sure so sure 'planning' is the key word.
Where earlier public utilities and health care were run by trusting the competence of local leadership to do the right thing and the right decisions - nowadays, it is all about making the right incentive schemes, paying for each operation, each patient, each student, inventing fake markets, and so on.
All the while I hear and read more and more of the soviet-style horror stories about managers adapting in curious ways - shipping in patients from far away while sending local patients on plane because you get more money for the former, giving patients more expensive but more dangerous treatments because that treatment is on the list of operations that give state funds and the other is not yet... Etc.
It is not just a problem of state-market entanglement, either. If you have private hospitals and private insurance companies trying to work along the lines of 'it is just business', you get, at least in principle, the same problems. I am sure US people can supply some horror stories about that.
So it seems to me that the problems of 'planning' is not limited to the Soviet system, it was just more obvious there. In any compensation scheme where you cannot rely on trust you seem to get the same problems, and the more complex and legally entangled capitalism becomes, the more it seems to be run on such schemes, too.
The opposite of such 'planning' seems to me to be trust in local competence and the right to make decisions on lower levels without being goaded by external incentives.
Anyway, that is just my not very coherent musings on the matter.
- Per