Put us on a single payer system and whose border do we then cross to seek care when the system bogs down? The Canucks get to come down here. Do we go to Mexico?
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What you're arguing (consolidating entire industries and making everyone goverment workers) is called Communism and it has failed in every instance that it has been tried.
Not that I agree that public healthcare is communism, and not that I'm endorsing communism, but I want you to do something. Get a stopwatch, start it, click here, and see how long it takes you to spot the obscenely large hole in your statement. We're talking like nine and a half million square kilometres here.
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Naturally, I had to reply to THAT.
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...and you're actually saying that Communist China is a better place to live than Canada or the US? Am I hearing you right?
I'm sorry, but if given the choice (and the chance), which system of government would the Chinese rather live under? Humor me.
Communism may be a form of government, but in terms of serving the people that live under it, it falls far short of democracies and republics.
I'm saying that communism can hardly be described as having failed when, economically, China is basically poised to overtake the US within 20 years. Their standard of living is up every time someone checks on it, the economy is highly market-oriented but still within the political framework provided by the Communist Party, and the government is being more lenient with artists and journalists than ever. If you go to the middle of Beijing, you can hardly tell it apart from any urban center in the West -- office towers, people in suits, crowded streets, shopping centres, big reader boards. All my Chinese contacts' Internet connetions are like 20 times faster than mine. And for God's sake, they own half of IBM.
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I'm tempted to bring up Clinton's Open Door policy, but would that be going off-topic?
(goes off to find a list of how many political prisoners have been killed in Communist China)