"Universal" means goverment-paid. It means that we have officially accepted that healthcare is so unfathomably impossible for a normal person to afford that the

"Universal" means goverment-paid. It means that we have officially accepted that healthcare is so unfathomably impossible for a normal person to afford that the government has to inflate the cost out of existence. This is obviously not a sustainable or mature solution to the problem, but it's a band-aid that appears to relieve much of the burden involved for patients. I broke it out once and my net salary would be about $1k less than what I receive now if I lived in Canada instead of the U.S. I know that those extra taxes aren't all directly attributable to the health care apparatus, but the unverified impression is that a lot of it goes to that. There have been periods when I've had to pay more than $1000/mo on medical bills on an ongoing basis, and there's pretty much always at least $500/mo going out to medical payments of some type or another in our family of 7. Our credit has also been routinely hounded by the medical industry's inability to figure out its own billing. Is avoiding all of that worth a net loss of $500/mo? Probably. The polarization in America is really sad. We need to acknowledge that these are legitimate issues. Republicans need to take their heads out of the sand and quit just shrieking that "we have the best health care in the world!!!! We're America, bitch!", and Democrats need to respect that Republicans don't think "Just have the government pay for it and increase taxation commensurately" is an acceptable solution. Let's get away from each others' throats and try to figure this out constructively. IMO the best option is to outlaw non-catastrophic medical insurance, set up new, temporary medical device and pharmaceutical suppliers who sell brand-name products at a loss, make serious revisions to the terms of drug patents, remove any applicable governmental subsidies that encourage reckless, unsustainable expansion of medical facilities, and make a law that says medical bills cannot be included in any credit worthiness determination. This converts everyone to self-pay, which means medical providers will have to charge prices that real people can actually pay, it will end the absurd pricing showdowns and billing shenanigans between providers and insurers that often leave patients as collateral damage, it will undercut the supply chain that ratchets up the costs for everyone on the way down to the patient, it will discourage hospitals from building extravagant campuses that rival universities and instead focus on affordable, utilitarian designs, and so on. I can hardly think of a worse solution than "just make everyone get an insurance policy and leave everything else essentially the same", aka Obamacare/Romneycare. That should take us a long way to a sustainable, market-based solution. But it's clear at this point that some governmental action is needed to grease the wheels here.