The debate in the US is not about healthcare at all. Healthcare is a proxy for something deeper going on in this country. The US is not a nation the way France, Germany, Japan, China or most any other nation is. Maybe some of the African nations or the nations formerly known as Yugoslavia have the same issues as we do, but I doubt it. The United States has no coast to coast ethnic identity. There are a patchwork of ethnic identities that are regional and there is also a cosmopolitan/rural/exurban split going on as well. It has been said that Americans(the US variety) are extremely patriotic in that we love our country but hate our government. I disagree with this assertion because I've lived in so many parts of the US. Nationalism here is based on an ideal rooted in one's regional and class identity. One tends to project that identity outwards ignoring the facts on the ground, namely the regional and other demographic differences. One assumes that America is like their own little neighborhood except for those places that are UnAmerican. Those places shift depending on who you are, but you intensely distrust and dislike those places because they are foreign or somehow infiltrated by outsiders who implicitly undeserving and morally suspect. If this were all about simple policy issues such as funding, we'd have had this national healthcare system back in the 1970s. However, the big problem with taxes, especially since Reagan is the perception that one's taxes go to outsiders who agendas that are inimical to one's own group, the True Americans. So when the ultimate outsiders, the politicians in DC start talking about changing the way things work in your community in way that really affects you, fear and distrust takes over, hence the propaganda and the lies. This all buries the real debate which should be over costs and revenues.