Socialized Health Care in the USA

[Thecla]

I guess I just don't have any faith in them doing anything other than what they've done to Medicare and Medicaid.

I agree that radical things need to be done to change the system. Let's just try something radically American, rather than radically European.

It seems to me the current system is already radically american (or, perhaps more accurately, USian), and it's not working. It's not containing costs, it's not providing effective health care per dollar, it's not encouraging preventive health care, it spends too much on the old at the expense of the young, it leaves many people uninsured or underinsured, etc etc -- all the things already mentioned. About the only thing more radically american one could do is to cut out medicare and medicaid altogether (and social security while one is at it).

Now I understand you're coming at this from a definite "small-government view" in which it seems like the military is about the only necessary government institution (though one might ask why that should be excepted if everything else is better off without government interferences -- after all, the US already went part way in Iraq to privatizing military functions, and the CIA considered outsourcing terrorist assasinations to Blackwater;)).

But in my view access to adequate health care is a basic thing that every member of a society should have, just as every child, however poor their family, should have the opportunity to acquire an education. And I don't see how those goals can be met without strong public and government support and a willingness on the part of people to pay for them.