>>- 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.

I understand the pessimism if you believe the rest of the world has 100% socialized medical care. I wouldn't want that either. Also worth noting that the US already has very large and expensive socialized healthcare schemes. One is called Medicare whose taxpayer funding is fiercely defended by its beneficiaries, so don't imagine there's no support whatsoever in the US.

>>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.

While you like to paint people who disagree with you as GOP or Trump fans, I have no confidence that the current US government is going to remedy your broken healthcare system. Even the most basic foundations of what already is effectively a socialized system- like most insurance schemes- is under threat. The one I've raised here before is the combination of what is called individual mandate in the US, with coverage of pre-existing conditions. For efficiency and decency you need the second but you can't have the second without the first. Otherwise it's like allowing people to go without house insurance until there's a fire, at which point they can take a policy and receive full coverage. This simple equation seems to be a mystery to too many US politicians and much of the MSM, so if you want to label something stupid- try that.

>>Attitude doesn't really apply here.

Sure it does, since nothing will change if people are more interested in fixing the blame than the problem. I detect a strong desire to assert victim status in the US at the moment. But the Founding Fathers went to quite some trouble to ensure that you're not helpless against the state. People need to get off ther proverbials, reacquaint themselves with protections under law and demand a government that you deserve. Which is what you have at the moment, for all the wrong reasons. It meets the earlier definition of insanity to bewail a binary system that clearly has failed you, as people continue supporting and enabling their side of the failed binary divide. You have a lot more in common with people like Bill than you think, even if it's DNC playbook to call him stupid because he voted for Trump and to ignore his repeated explanations of why he did it when clearly he's a natural liberal.

As an example, if only the energy expended on protests screaming "not my president" (when he clearly is) were expended on protest at the $47T unfunded Medicare deficit, warning politicians to engage on the point or else. You might even get gun-toting Alabamans marching alongside NY hipsters with nose piercings and rainbow hats on that one. ;-)

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

No. I'm saying that unusually high corporate taxes create perverse incentives that eventually reduce the tax take if trillions are hoarded abroad. Invariably dumbing that down to "you support reducing tax on billionaires and rich fat cats!" is a great way to ensure the hoard grows so big it creates new perverse incentives. My grandma used to tell me "a stitch in time saves nine" meaning that leaving this festering just makes the eventual reckoning worse and worse.

>>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.

So why go for Canada. Start with Switzerland whose excellent healthcare is funded by a series of private insurers. That'll prove more acceptable to your legions of market believers- until they discover that the insurers don't get to distribute profit. ;-) Force them to admit that they value their own profits over the welfare of the nation and now it's a different sort of debate.

Believe it or not, I've spent 25 years looking at these funding models and it's regrettable that it all boils down here to binary US behaviors. Yes, your model is failing- but it is pessimistic to assume there's no alternative when you have the unusual privilege of picking the best bits out of those who went first, to deliver a fantastic system that avoids most of the mistakes. Or you can just keep up the binary squabbling expecting a different result. I'm reminded of that famous quote from Quality Assurance guru Deming: "There's no obligation to change. Survival is optional." That's especially true of US healthcare funding that IMHO was at best a decade from collapse until the ACA came in and postponed that. But no politician seems brave enough to grasp the Medicare deficit nettle and depending what the GOP does, the healthcare doomsday clock could move forward or backwards.