Quote:

I'm glad there's some opposition, though. I personally don't think this nation is ready to accept the kind of responsibility of nationalized health care, but I hope we work towards it in the future. Without priming ourselves for it, we'd just be stuck waiting in lines and b*tching, instead of trying to take care of ourselves and avoid the line in the first place!




Just asking the question here ... but don't you already have plenty of examples of socialized healthcare inherent to your system?

If you believe what you see on TV there are hundreds of examples every night of gang-bangers (no disrespect intended)who never paid a tax dollar in their lives, being admitted to ERs across the country - all on the taxpayers dime, ultimately. Can you really say that there isn't already an element of socialized medicare built into the system?

And yet, there are probably even more examples of the tax-paying working poor who for one reason or another lose a job and healthcare coverage at the same time (or never qualified for coverage), and are forced into bankruptcy over some curable health problem. And then to add insult to injury, the needed healthcare is then available to them as part of various social safety nets already in place. Considering the above paragraph, can you really say that these folks don't deserve some better access to socialized medicare; access that doesn't involve the loss of everything they have in order to qualify?

Not being judgemental here - just trying to reconcile things that don't make sense to me.