It's the Politics, Stupid.

As Mark Thomas remark of this oft-linked NY Times article titled "Universal Healthcare: Just a (big) step away" -- " While the economics may work, the same cannot be said about the politics".

The bottom line is, the amount of money we're losing by subsidizing health insurance is so huge that if we can pool it, we would have almost enough to institute a universal program that covers everyone. But we can't get from A to B because of the huge hump imposed by political barriers in the middle.

What we need is a catalyst, something to get the ball rolling and cut down the political barrier. I really believe action on the state level is what is going to eventually get us to universal healthcare. When people see that others in a neighboring state no longer have to worry about what happens to their healthcare if anything happened to their job, or if their employer won't provide it, they are going to clamor for the same in their own state. Of course, one can reasonably ask why Americans didn't look to the north or to Europe, saw that everybody's healthcare needs were taken care of for cheep and clamored for universal healthcare here. But we can only hope that state-based chauvanism is less deep-seated than nationalism -- America gotta be number one, so by extention our healthcare has gotta be number one. How would it look if we ever started learning anything from *gasp* Canada?