It'd be nice if we were in a place where the main ideas in this article, providing the health care people can afford and no more, were somewhat applicable. Unfo

It'd be nice if we were in a place where the main ideas in this article, providing the health care people can afford and no more, were somewhat applicable. Unfortunately people in the US literally cannot afford any health care of any kind, aside from over-the-counter items like Band-Aids and cough syrup and those kinds of items won't get you very far. Forgetting this, or leaving it out of the article entirely as the author of this article does, is dangerous and misleading. It seems obvious but the article forgets to mention that since health care is so expensive and no one can afford it, everyone buys health insurance. Even health insurance has become expensive to the point that no one can afford it, people need a larger organization to help purchase this insurance on their behalf (like their employer or now, the government). Now we've reached the point were even that has become too expensive. The guy in the cube next to me broke his hand skate boarding and is spending almost 1/10th of his salary on covering the cost and he's employed. For sure, the history of health insurance and health care in the US is complicated and it's not as straightforward. But that is where things are today: unless you are wealthy or work for a wealthy company, health care is the kind of expense that can balloon out of control, despite purchasing insurance. In my opinion, that is what people object so vigorously to: spending money on health insurance (and a lot of it) and still having to miss car and mortgage payments so that they can give more money to doctors and pharmacies and hospitals to keep their spouse or children or themselves alive. You can choose to skimp on food, few of us would choose to willingly lose a loved one because "we can't afford it." If I had to choose what should be made non-profit, my first choice would be insurance companies. By definition, for-profit companies would like to make more profit every year. There's a clearly unhealthy co-dependency between insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and hospitals. Fixing it all in one swoop is probably impossible, but one way to make health insurance non-profit is to make it government run. We can't seem to get that done, so now the government is trying to join workplaces in helping people to buy insurance. It's the simplest and probably the only legal solution so that's the one that is being pursued in the US. We'll see how it goes.