No one offers free shit. We literally live in a socialist setting as is. From PUBLIC funded roads to police firefighters etc etc. All the way to the military. What's wrong with a little higher education? We're already falling behind the world in a education... Why not promote knowledge? I guess we're better at sending people to die than to learn.
Absolutely agree.
I'm a Brit. We are a democratic country with a capitalist economy. Just like the US.
We have free, universal healthcare (NHS) & virtually no one thinks of it as "socialist". Depending on your perspective, people see it as patriotic, Christian, humanist, or for the vast majority, simply just "the right thing to do".
It all comes down to how it's viewed & how it's presented ideologically. This is the big difference between the US & the UK.
We see it as a public service. We see NHS workers as public servants in the same way as we do the military, the police, social services, fire brigade, teachers etc. We see the funding of it through general taxation in the same way - it's a public service, everyone benefits from it & all contribute to it. No one likes paying taxes, but 99.9% of people don't have a problem with their taxes being spent on the NHS because we all use it. Everyone.
It's not perfect, by any means, but we have a longer life expectancy & lower infant mortality rate than the US. You beat us on cancer & heart attack survival rates, but it's not by much.
The massive irony is that the US already spends more tax dollars per person on public healthcare than the UK does & has done for years, under both Democrat & Republican administrations. Only instead of that money being spent on the actual tax payers, the majority of it ends up in the bank accounts of the healthcare industry & big pharma instead, who then tell you that the government spending
your hard earned tax dollars to
your benefit would be
evil, unAmerican "socialism " blah blah blah.
Point is, the US can already afford free, universal healthcare without spending a single extra cent of taxpayers money. You just have to spend the money differently. To do that requires a change in public mindset first. It's no more "socialist" than publicly funded roads, the military, the police, teachers etc.
To us Brits, when it comes to healthcare, your governments (both Democrat & Republican) have been taking your tax dollars for years & in return, giving you a very dry fucking up the arse without so much as giving you a pillow to bite down on & telling you it's in the name of "freedom" & if you don't agree then you're obviously a
Goddam fucking commie bastard or whatever.
"How" the US could actually switch to a NHS style model in practice though, I have no idea. But it can't happen regardless whilst people keep thinking it's "socialism". It really isn't.