Jake, I think the last figure I saw showed 47 million Americans without coverage. About 1/6 of the nation. What I'm not game for is covering those 47 million--some of whom are real tear-jerk stories, others of whom can afford to pay but choose not to--if it means that the rest of us are kicked down to the least common denominator of coverage. According to figures recently published in the Des Moines Register, universal health care in Iowa would cost $550 million per year. They say that it would simply be "cost shifting", because those of us that currently pay for insurance are paying more to cover those that don't, and the lower cost of our insurance will offset the required tax increase. So show me that my wife's employer is going to give her additional take-home pay equal to my tax increase, and show me that we can keep the coverage we now have, without penalty, and I'm willing to listen. (Missouri is our next-door neighbor, so the "show me" stuff occasionally rubs off.)

King, you're confusing social reform with freedom. Cuba has better health care and education now than it did under Batista. But it also has no political dissent, no freedom of speech. The Soviet Union provided better health care and education than Tsarist Russia. Overall improvement, or not? Mussolini made the trains run on time; Hitler built the autobahn. That does not make them, nor the systems they created, worthy of admiration. A very famous American said "Give me liberty or give me death!" Well, death is likely to come sooner with poor health care, but personally I'd rather live free--as the motto of a state bordering your country suggests.

"Secessionist" movements . . . Yugoslavia was an artificial construct, brought about by WWI and the end of the Hapsburg Empire. The people of Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Kosovo etc are simply withdrawing from something their ancestors were forced into in the first place. Should the Soviet Union have remained one big, unhappy country simply because a long list of tsars and commissars put it together by force, or should its component pieces have had the opportunity to go their own way, as they have? Secession isn't always bad, nor is it always violent. I doubt it would be if Quebec were to declare its independence, any more than it was when the Czechs and the Slovaks chose divorce. There's even talk of it happening in Belgium.

As for opting out, this country has a different tradition than yours, or most of the world's. We haven't gone nearly so far down the road to socialism. And interestingly enough, some of the countries that have--France being an excellent example--are taking steps in the opposite direction. There has been talk of at least partially privatizing our longest-standing and largest social program, Social Security--precisely so that those individuals willing to take personal responsibility for their own retirement could at least partially opt out.

Americans are big on choice. We tend to look with disfavor on "one size fits all" solutions. That's why you see the skepticism where universal health care is concerned, even though we all realize the system we now have is not a good one. The problem lies in coming up with one that offers coverage for all without forcing people into something that's worse than what they already have, or forcing them to pay more for what they already have to sustain yet another large government bureaucracy.