Democrats need to stop teasing us with universal healthcare

[anvi]

These idiotic Dem Presidential candidates like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama need to get with the program and stop promising universal healthcare because its never going to happen.

You mean the program that leaves tens of millions of Americans out of health insurance coverage and allows tens of thousands of them to die preventable deaths every year?  Yep, that's a program we can all be proud of.

[anvi]

Hagrid,

I'll leave aside for the moment the supposed "inevitability" of abolition (it only came only with great effort, cost and the loss of many, many lives).  I'll also leave aside the "foundational" nature of resistance to taxes for the time being.

There was no such things as health insurance in the United States at the time of the founding.  The earliest policies regarding accidental insurance were not offered until the mid-to-late 19th century.  Does the non-existence of health insurance at the time of the country's founding imply that it should never be an issue of national importance or constitutional debate in the future?  If the founders wished no changes be made the the Constitution to suit the needs of future generations, why would they have put an amendment process in place?  If they had not wishes the democratically elected representatives of the people to make laws to meet their changing needs through time as they saw fit, why did they map out a legislative process at all?

If the U.S. has anything that can be called "foundational ideas" of lasting value, they are about the process of governing and the limits of governmental powers, and much, much less about the content of what we should or shouldn't do at any given time.  If there ever does come a time when Americans want to find a way for everyone to have access to health insurance, then the founders have mapped out a process through which we can do it.  We haven't done it up to now because, all things considered, we haven't wanted to.  If there was a willingness to do it on the part of enough citizens and representatives, we would find a way to do it, and our Constitutional and legislative processes would not block our path, they would enable us to walk on it.