Anna, at Dakota Women, announces that she is leaving our fine state to seek an advanced degree in history. I have enjoyed our exchanges and I wish her well. I hope she continues to post at DW.
She has a thoughtful response to my recent post on the poor outlook for Canadian style health care in America.
Over at SDP they're terrified of the SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. As probably the only person participating in the Dakota political blogosphere who has actual experience with these big, scary, foreign government-sponsored healthcare programs (in Norway, the most evil of all the welfare states), I have to say that a lot of these fears are unfounded. I don't know if universal health care through the government is the answer - truly, I don't - but I also find the huge numbers of un-or-under-insured people in this country pretty shameful. I know it's crazy to think that a medical emergency shouldn't lead to bankruptcy and financial ruin, but there you have it.
I reply that I might be terrified of socialized medicine except that the point of my article was that a universal failure in the U.S. politically speaking. My post focused on its failure in Illinois. I remind Anna that back when Congress was last in Democratic hands, and the President was also a Democrat, the attempt to institute socialized medicine was a political disaster.
But Anna and I are largely in agreement on the issue. She isn't sure that big government health care is the solution. I am pretty sure that it isn't. We both think that some way should be found to ensure that medical emergencies do not bankrupt families. But I suspect that the dream of making the U.S. health care system more like that of Canada (or Norway) retards our search for a viable policy.
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