>Grady, earlier I posted a peer-reviewed academic paper reviewing healthcare costs in the US. According to the paper, most personal bankruptcies in the US are caused by catastrophic medical bills. Of these bankrupted people who could not pay their medical bills, 75% had healthcare insurance. The demographic is middle-class people with jobs and homes, though they soon lost both.
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>This is true despite the fact that Medicare segregates the huge costs of medical care for the elderly away from this demographic. People say Medicare is a mess, but medical care for the elderly is a mess everywhere in the first world as our populations age and need more and more care. The above figures exclude these costs that are a major burden for comparative systems. If Medicare were rolled back into the insurance mix, healthcare would be unaffordable for the elderly as well as the middle class before the end of Obama's first term, allowing him to take it all over without a fight if that truly were his intention. So perhaps he should give his detractors what they say they want.

The root of many of these problems is that people are living much longer but expecting to retire at the same age as years ago. When the idea of caring for people in old age was first raised very few people actually made it that far.