>I don't buy this sort of pessimism:

- but sadly in this case it's realism not pessimism. The realism is that you have to admit is that we will never join the rest of the world and have 100% socialized medical care. It's just never going to happen. We can be optimistic and say we can move the needle more that direction by electing the right officials to office and creating laws and such to move us more that direction...and over time we will get closer.

>>> We will never get to a point where we provide medical for everyone like the rest of the developed world because there are too many people making too much money off it -- HOWEVER we CAN move that direction and over time have improvements....sadly the GOP wants to move the wrong direction, and not all dems are innocent here either.
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>If this is the attitude then "we have met the enemy and he is us."

Attitude doesn't really apply here. It's really pretty simple to look at the bills regarding this that come up for a vote. Who came up with the bill, what it contains, and how the elected officials voted for it. When one party unanimously votes (with one or two exceptions) to strip millions of American's of their heath care, and the other party unanimously votes to let people keep their health care, I'd say it's pretty clear which party is at fault here yes? Now observe what just happened with the GOP's attempt to repeal ObamaCare - it's exactly what I just laid out here. Now since the GOP failed at that, they're attempting to destroy ObamaCare via a damn tax bil by trying to sneak that into the bill. So the conclusion here is as about as simple of one to come to as you can get.

>Nor am I interested in defending the GOP Tax Plan- or why would I be posting examples of progressive tax plans?

You say that - but you're defending the GOP Tax Plan to reduce taxes of billionaires and corporations.

>American Exceptionalism aside, if it works elsewhere but refuses to do so in the US- then the intellectual response is to ask why. It's not a law of nature that some things simply can't work in the US, period. Even if they haven't until now. If you're not interested, then nor am I.

It's not that I'm not interested. I would much rather see our heath care system work like Canada's -- but I'm also aware of the fact that it's simply not possible for that to ever happen. I would like to see us move that direction - and America can learn a lot from other countries regarding that. But seeing how it makes up 1/6 of our nations economy and there are so many people making money off it, one has to admit the facts that it's never going to be completely like all the other countries. As far as taxes go, until we get the $ out of politics in this country we're all kind of screwed on that too. Best option is to hold our elected officials accountable and vote for democrats that won't vote to raise taxes on the poor to give tax breaks to the rich like the GOP is doing. I've said many times that we can learn from other countries - maybe not exactly clone their ways of doing things, but at least take some of the good parts of it that we can use and apply it to our system. At the moment however we have a serial liar / idiot for a president and a pile of backwards-thinking GOP'ers in congress so don't hold your breath.