Most entertaining and the point does come through pretty clearly for me. Though personally, the only thing I’m against is fineing people $900-$3800 for not buying health insurance because it will be mandatory. Thats the only thing I have against the healthcare bill issue. Though I’m all in favor of making it so the cost are a lot less and more affordable as well as there being more insurance companies that are not in it only or the money like how all of the current companies, (6 total) are all about the money and not wanting to pay out for medical and health cost.

>the US is pretty much the only so-called “first world” nation that doesn’t have it

Probably because we’ve seen how well it works. That and the whole thing about it being blatantly unconstitutional. That could be changed with an amendment, but doing things legally is such a pain in the neck.

@Richard:

So, universal health care works poorly in other countries? I guess that’s what you mean. You might really be honest with your statement that “we’ve seen how well it works” in which case I apologize for the following tirade, but it really reads like sarcasm so I’m going to assume that it was meant as such.

I’m guessing you are one of the people who’re saying “Oh no, we can’t have like in that evil leftist Europe! Things are horrible over there – the government decides who lives and dies and kills millions with their evil UHC, people wait for years for their procedures and the medical care they do receive is so abysmal compared to our superior American doctors!”

Well, I’ve lived in Europe my entire life and I’ve never noticed any of that.

But let’s put my highly anecdotal “Things are good in my experience”-argument aside and look at some numbers, shall we?

If you look at the CIA world factbook you find for instance that the infant mortality rate in the U.S. is 6.26 deaths/1,000 live births, while in my country (Sweden) it’s 2.75 deaths/1,000 live births. U.S. life expectancy at birth is 78.11 years, in Sweden it’s 80.86 years.

Tell me, if our very, very socialized health care system has failed us so completely over here, why do we live longer? You can find similar numbers for most UHC-countries. But you won’t let that get in the way of your unsubstantiated “Well, we’ve seen how well that works!”-argument, will you?

Bah, whatever. Bottom line is that the U.S. health care system is a mess that works really good for a sizable chunk of the population but not well at all for the rest. You can choose to fix this or not, but I’m just tired of all the people telling me that the health care that has helped my sick friends so much in their lives doesn’t work. It’s just not nice to lie to further your agenda.