OVM, you take care of your citizens by doing what you are supposed to do, follow the constitution and allow them to make choices, make money and let them decide what is good for them. When you start as a government putting restrictions on the citizens and try to take care of them in their every day lives, then you become a dictator - no other way around it.
As you will read, I use the word Freedom. It really is the solution not the cause for the problems.
Sorry OVM and Robsdad, but there are a lot of reasons why the US has not gone to any socialized medical program.
1 – Comparing other countries to the US is wrong. There are cultural differences, philosophical differences and there is a stark difference in how freedom is defined. For example, freedom in the UK is not the same as our freedom where we define freedom as both civil and financial freedom. In the EU it is something that has little to do with financial freedoms but the freedom to move around and so on.
2 – Taking Canada for instance, our GDP is 10 times their size, our population is 10 times their size so any program that is to cover a large portion of the population is a great undertaking and may cost more than it is worth. For many it would seem to be a given that a country our size could provide free everything but in truth the larger the country, the more costly and complex the system has to be and the more far reaching effects it would have on the people it is there to serve – just look at the welfare system here, the VA health care system and Social Security. We have yet provided good health care for our veterans and their numbers are less then 4 million the last I heard and you really expect to have a system that will be able to take care of 313 million? Our biggest expense to our country is not the war, not the roads, not the largest employer in the world but Social Security. It cost us more to administer alone it than any other program we have, the cost of running it is so high that we can take all that money we collect and pay our debt down in 15 years. The solution is to eliminate it by phasing it out in 20 or 30 years but no one wants to do that. Oh ....and spending 9 billion on the war and another 3 billion a day on foreign aid is STILL a lot less than what is spent domestically.
3 – Our economy is completely different, even though it seems that we are the same, we are not. Our economy is driven by the small businesses, not the big corporation, Canada and the EU larger business seem to be the focus, but I may be wrong with Canada. The EU for example has a highly regulated economic system that is teetering on Fascist control measures all in order to produce an equal footing for all to maximize revenue for the EU to operate. We here in the US tend to look at regulations as a road block, taxes as a way to stifle growth and government intervention as un-American. This all goes hand in hand with Freedom, the individualism that the country was built on. See one very large problem is we have the worst tax system in the world here, we have the most punitive tax system and people fall for the big business is controlling everything BS because they can’t see what is going on in our government or understand that a candidate should not be speaking of communist type programs but ways of helping all of us without destroying the country.
4 – Our golden age was not today but it was exactly 100 years ago. At that time we had a balance of health care, public aid and access for all. We had reforms going on, anti-trust suits and a government that was working. Then we got income tax that was sold to us as a punishment of the rich for being rich and then our civil freedoms were restricted. Until the ‘30s, many of the working class looked for health care from local doctors who they can trust that lived in the community and that sometimes were paid for by corporate welfare. We didn’t have people dying in mass because there was no insurance or there was no government health plan. But thanks to the ‘30s, we ended up going from a “can do” attitude to an “I want it because” attitude. Culturally we are not fit to have the government do a thing for us and the fact that we watch the pandering to desperate people who in many cases can’t or won’t be responsible, we end up with more problems than solutions.
The solutions are few but they can work if we want them to but if you think that government is the solution for your problems, think again. Everything is a mess now because of government. The biggest and best change we can make is with our tax system, go ahead and read about the
Fair Tax.
