I read almost all the pages since my first reply way back on page one. I don't have too much more to add, since I said a mouthful the first time, but I wanted to add a few things after having read everyone else's opinions.
The first thing I notice is people pointing at the health coverage in nations with universal coverage and saying it doesn't work. I'm not sure where you get your information, but I have heard overwhelmingly good things. Sure, no system works seamlessly, but they work a heck of a lot better than ours.
Second, lots of people wanted to point fingers at irresponsible Americans raising the cost of healthcare for everyone and not wanting to pay for your neighbor's bad choices. I have to say that in every system, even the one we currently have, we all pay for the health of the nation. Both in our premiums and in our tax dollars. It's been well publicized that America spends the most per capita on health care now and that we get the least return for our investment. That extra money goes to malpractice lawyers and insurance company profits. If you want cheaper health care, the solution is not to lower government involvement, it's to take the profiteers out of the picture. If you want to trust your doctor more, we need to take the medical community's fears of litigation away. This situation is improved through state-managed coverage.
Third, people are bringing up mismanagement in other systems without realizing that even though it was probably wrong for America to hesitate on implementing national healthcare, we stand to benefit from the ability to analyze the things that went wrong in other nations' systems. We aren't starting from zero, and we can build a better system. It's quite something that normal, everyday people have been convinced that a public service for all would do them a disservice, and that somehow what they have now is good, when it's in fact worse than any other industrialized nation, even though none of them have a GDP to match ours.
Finally, after all this talk of how some people feel like they're being scammed by their lazy neighbors who make bad decisions and want health coverage when the nation can't afford it, I didn't see anyone pointing out that our government spends money on things that are far less beneficial to the American taxpayers than preventative treatment and healthcare, and that the second the irresponsible bankers needed a handout, the money miraculously appeared very quickly to try to fix the financial crisis. I just want fairness. At that time, someone said "it's socialism for the rich, and dog-eat-dog capitalism for the rest of us." Well, I'm not ok with that. I'd rather stop funding certain things that I view as a misappropriation of my tax dollars and spend that money instead on things that have immediate benefit on me and my community. At the very least, if Iraq gets healthcare paid for by my taxes, then I also want healthcare paid for by my taxes. I don't want to begrudge them what they have, I just want to be covered too. I'm not asking for a handout, I'm asking for a redistribution of spending. Back when the bailout happened, I did a simple calculation and found that the OECD average per capita expenditure on health insurance is $2100. If we implemented a similar model, we could insure every American for $58 billion less than the financial bailout cost us.
So for all this crazy scaremongering talk about socialism and capitalism, let's look at how our nation really runs.
