I know a retired couple in the US. He lost his pension when Enron went belly-up. They lost 2/3 of their income overnight but they were only worried about the loss of their health insurance. That's what is difficult for people in other countries to understand.
Rhetoric about freedom of choice is nonsense when it means the freedom to be forced to pay vastly over the odds for basic healthcare or have none. It's no different from Blair's rhetoric about freedom of choice in education. "Education, education, education" sounded good at the time, until we realised that it meant a 3 tier system of excellence for the rich, adequate state funding for the moderately well-off and far less than adequate state funding for the poor.
Propaganda is a remarkably powerful thing; it's amazing what people fall for. Blair sold us to the corporations and now Brown is making sure the effective two-identical-party system is set in stone, just as it is in the US. He shut down internal party democracy within the Labour party at conference last week.
The problem is, we can't keep borrowing money indefinitely to fund this excess greed from the rich whilst destroying manufacturing jobs at home. It'll hurt when the crash comes. Sooner rather than later given the number of countries who are now doing significant parts of their trade in currencies other than the nose-diving dollar.
But that's propaganda for you. Reality always catches up eventually.
http://tinyurl.com/38f4dm
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=9494