[Blarg]

I love the idea, and so do my friends and relatives in Germany and France. There's always a trade-off, but they view it, as I do, as one of the fundamental things a modern government should do and is capable of doing.

Here in America, being underinsured or even uninsured is extremely common. Having health insurance with limited coverage or that is too expensive to pay for is a poor to non-existent solution. Typically, people in lower income classes very rarely go to the doctor, as they can't afford it. This means that when they do get to a doctor, their conditions tend to be far advanced. This changes them from fairly minor and inexpensive matters to sometimes costly and, despite that, still fatal or crippling matters. As treating someone with an advanced condition for even a few days can be enormously expensive compared to the cost of preventive medicine, regular check ups, and minor medical care, we have a kind of "false savings" here that doesn't really come out in the wash.

And, we have a greater chance by far of families with one less earning parent. In an America whose social mores encourage single-parenthood, this can mean no parent at all, with the resultant social and economic costs.

I predict this thread will be filled with bad behavior too long, though, because healthcare got pinned to Hillary Clinton in the public mind, and is one of those knee-jerk, scream till you're blue in the face, America-does-everything-right issues that there's really no talking about. Politically, it's also dead in the water, like changes in social security or the mortgage tax deduction, because few people want to either admit the real costs or think much about having to pay them, and the people most negatively affected are trivially easy to ignore.

Good luck on the subject. But I suspect we're due for vastly more heat than light.