Reply #56: To answer your questions

[Selatius]

1. It's not free. Medicare for seniors is not "free" in any sense of the word. We all pay into it to ensure seniors don't die of illnesses that can be treated. Would you rather your grandfather's medical costs be born by you entirely? Or that we all chip in and pay a slice of his bill in return that when our time of sickness comes you pay back a slice of your own?

2. The notion of long wait times is a tired bugaboo that evidence from France and Canada and others doesn't bear out. If anything, the wait times in the US are WORSE than in Canada, except if you're rich, especially if you are in an area suffering massive population booms that the medical infrastructure has not yet caught up with. The World Health Organization does not think the US has the best health care in the world. They dispute this idea that the US has the best system, and given the choice, I side with medical professionals' opinion in the WHO over your opinion.

3. There are no wait times for emergency care in countries like Canada or France. If you got shot or had a heart attack or lost your limb in an industrial accident or something of that type, you're going to get immediate help. The same happens here in the US, except not everybody has access to insurance, a whopping 45 million of them. For those who don't, they have to pay the price 100 percent, which is likely to drive a fair number into bankruptcy, which has an economic toll on the rest of the economy.

4. Health insurance companies play both sides of the aisle in terms of political contributions, but it's not true to say that because somebody is a Democrat it means he automatically takes PAC contributions from Aetna or Cigna or United Health or any other health insurance entity. If all Democrats were the same, nobody would be proposing Medicare For All acts like Conyers and Kucinich have and several others who have co-sponsored the legislation.

5. The Democratic Party should not be thought of as a real political party in any sense of the word. It's more like a coalition of disparate political interests, each wanting a pet issue of their own addressed. Just because there is one political interest in the party that opposes univeral health care does not automatically mean there is not another political interest within the same party that wants universal care. If a Blue Dog Democrat or a New Democrat does not want universal health care, a Progressive Caucus Democrat may actually want it.

To say that both parties are exactly the same on this issue is nothing short of intellectual laziness.