On Sun, 13 Sep 2009, James Heartfield wrote:
> Sure does look like a lot of angry people, though. From here, it seems
> quite remarkable that you cannot get a popular movement around social
> health care (which is close to a religious belief in the UK).
To be fair, the US has two big disadvantages compared to Europe:
1) By and large you guys created public health systems when there was no such thing as private health insurance -- there was no market to compete with. In the US, the one place this was true was for the very old, which was why passing Medicare was a cinch; and
2) During the progressive era (the first two decades of the century) America developed the very weird form of class-organization-pretending- to-not-be-one of "professional organizations." The American Medical Association was one of its templates and organizing against public health coverage (which they feared would end the petty-bourgeois organization of one-man firms) was their founding issue. They were remarkably successful in fighting it in part because they were remarkably well organized for it. Europe's doctors had no simply partisan. If they had, you guys probably wouldn't have had it either, because it's not an accident your doctors are paid so much less.
The AMA was the thing that kept health care identified with socialism from 1918 to the 1980s when medicine was reoganized into a corporate form (the HMO being the new template). Eventually (with some lag) the majority of doctors realized the petty bourgeois gig was up and now the majority support National health care. But by that time we had a new powerful opponent, the huge health care industry.
So we've always had major effective opponents that Europe didn't have to face.
Michael