Quote Originally Posted by Tufty View Post
My personal view is that health care should be available to everybody - irrespective of whether they can afford to pay for it or not. Our Natioanl Health Service in the UK caters for that although, as fetishdj says, "Our NHS is beleagured and underfunded at the moment"

From another personal perspective, if I'd had to pay for the treatment and medications I've received over the last 2 year, I'd have gone up in smoke out of the crematorium chimney a year ago!!
The problem with the national healthcare is that it's funding don't tend to increase at the same rate as both the new possible forms of healthcare (new drugs and treatment methods and so one) arrive and the increase in population size at the same time.. (in the case of nations with diminishing populations it's a labour problem, the workforce increasing in value causing healthcare to cost rate becoming horrible..
Something I think would be sensible in the US is something along the line of the school system in my own country..
Here public schools dominate most of the education but it is legal with private schools, in the sense that they're not allowed to earn money and that they're provided about the same amount of founding as a public school would pr student, they can however cover some additional costs with money from the students (generally payed for by cheap student loans granted by the government).
This system allows some variety in education as people with a different life stance get the chance to run their own schools and so can people that don't believe in the way the public schools try to teach away things and think other ways of teaching away things would be better..
Something like that would probably work as well for the hospitals as for the schools..
Off course all of this require people to actually trust the government, something that the people of the US don't seam to do at the moment.. or am I wrong?