As another non-OP libertarian leaning commenter taking your off-topic bait, no, I don't think it's essential infrastructure. Healthcare didn't even exist 100 ye

As another non-OP libertarian leaning commenter taking your off-topic bait, no, I don't think it's essential infrastructure. Healthcare didn't even exist 100 years ago beyond what you can find in any first-aid kit today, and we certainly aren't anywhere close to having a surplus of it available. As I've commented before, people regularly oversimplify this problem as socialized vs private healthcare without considering why American healthcare is so broken. If you look carefully at the problems, you see that they won't go away if the government replaces private insurance and expands Medicare for everyone. These problems include a tremendous shortage of doctors [0]. Even Canada and the UK have more doctors per capita, and they are known for extremely high wait times (the jokes of the socialized medicine countries, so to speak). There are a number of possible reasons for this, most notably the hassle of occupational licensing (12-14 years of expensive college + 'indentured servitude' residency in the US). Nonetheless, American healthcare science is still ahead of the curve and subsidizes socialized countries -- ~60% of all new drugs between 2001-2010 were invented in the US, and foreign dignitaries of socialized medicine countries often still get important procedures done in the US [1]. It would be interesting to see how the R&D dynamic plays out if America loses its market incentive to innovate in the space, and no other developed countries have the financial incentive left. [0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.MED.PHYS.ZS?end=2018.. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.MED.PHYS.ZS?end=2018.... [1] https://xconomy.com/seattle/2014/09/02/which-countries-excel.. https://xconomy.com/seattle/2014/09/02/which-countries-excel....