> your perspective is that the American government is so exceptional

If by "exceptional" you mean "incompetent", we are in agreement.

"American exceptionalism" is never used to mean "incompetence" or "less than..". It is always used to mean that we are better than others. We are not. In many ways we are far worse. In some ways we are far worse.

The mistake you might be making is not taking a moment to actually have a conversation and ask for clarification on my perspective. We all make that mistake in online conversations. I am not immune to that at all. Nobody is.

Don't confuse me saying that the US is not ready to institute what is generally referred to as "socialized medicine" we me suggesting that what we have been doing is the solution. Here's as clear a position statement as I can make on this:

It is disgusting, unforgivable and incomprehensible to me how a nation with the resources of the US does not have a healthcare system that covers everyone in the nation without people having to risk financial ruin to have access to healthcare. Our system should be the model by which everyone in the world measures their approach to healthcare and not an example of what not to do.

In other words, I firmly believe that healthcare in the US should not be something anyone looses sleep over, rich or poor. It should be, to use the term, exceptionally good. An example for all to follow.

The problem is that we are never going to get there when healthcare is so deeply connected to polarized politics, the incompetence and political party whims we have been subjected to for decades.

Our politicians have not worked for the people of this nation for decades (pick a number). In CS terms, their fitness function does not include a variable that measures the delivery of positive long term results for the people of this nation. Sometimes it seems that the only variables that drives their evolutionary path have been winning elections, accumulating power and polarizing the population along political party dividing lines in order to do so. In this sense, our system of government has been degrading for decades into something that, at the end of the day, does very little for us. In fact, one could argue the net effect is to constantly cause damage to this nation from the inside. We can list wars, healthcare, education, national debt, the economy and other areas as examples of this effect.

In this context, a system that would have this government in charge of our entire healthcare system would quickly become a nightmare. I shudder to think what that might look like. It would be horrible.

We cannot compare this nation to other nations. We cannot compare any two nations. Things that work elsewhere do not work here. There are cultural, legal and governmental differences everywhere.

Here's a simple example of that:

Sadly, in the US, when we have a disaster of some kind, people turn into mobs that destroy property and steal everything they can. They will break into homes and burn down business districts. It's sad to watch. And it is very real.

In Japan (and other nations), that simply does not happen. At all.

This has nothing to do with Japan's approach to policing or government. It's cultural. If we imported Japan's policing and government approaches into the US it would do nothing at all to mitigate this problem.

In the past, I lived in Latin America for over a decade. Both under democratically-elected (yeah, well, let's call it that) and military regimes. Guess what, they had "socialized medicine" that entire time. And it was a joke.

You cannot compare nations that way. You just can't.

From my perspective, I think what we have to do in the US is to release areas such as education and healthcare from the grips of political parties. In other words, there has to be unified national-level governance of these areas devoid of party affiliation. Policies should not change because a different political party is in power. That's breaking us. In a sense, it could be something like the Federal Reserve, which is politically neutral (nothing is 100%, but I think we can say they do far better than other agencies).

Anyhow, the point is, while I don't call it "socialized medicine", I do agree we need something that, conceptually at least, is similar to that idea. The US version of this solution likely looks very different from solutions in other parts of the world. How we get there is the problem.

No, Obamacare isn't that solution. It is, objectively speaking, an abomination. Today, you have 65 million people who think they have health insurance, when, in reality, they effectively signed their estates, their property, everything of value they own, to the government. That is horrible. That is criminal. Obamacare is, perhaps, the largest crime ever perpetrated against the people of this nation. If we were objective, nobody would support this abomination.

What do you think would happen here if we ran ads ever day for six months on every media outlet informing people of the fact that having Medicaid means the government gets to grab their property to pay for medical bills accrued starting when they become 55 years old?

Here's the part that collides with the concept of equity: For the poor or middle class, anyone who might barely manage to buy a home and live a modest life, Obamacare means that the government can take their entire estate. In this country, accumulating hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills after age 55 is incredibly easy. Which means that Obamacare could result in the middle class and below having to hand over their estates to pay for medical bills because their properties will barely cover the costs of the care they received. How is that not criminal?