Well, I shall try to explain some of the obstacles...

And I am all for universal health care..hopefully without destroying what already exists and instead of 40 million uninsured we have 300 million in a great big mess...but that seems to not be the way they are going and hopefully they will work on the 40 million people plus first and leave what is working somewhat in place while they fix what is not working. But I like the magic wand option the best still.

We are a country almost strangled by laws and legalities and lawsuits.

We are a country that talks about education a lot but for the most part does not prepare students for practical careers, and that is where the health care people should be mostly coming from.

We are e pluribus unum...which means we are not a more or less homogenized society..quite the opposite. Universal anything is easier if people are more or less on the same page.

We have a history of government inefficiencies and if you look to the VA as a guide..boy, have there been some horror stories.

The very foods that are killing us -- transfats, stuff made out of corn oil -- are often the ones that are subsidized. We also are financially addicted -- due to generations of poverty -- to wheat, which many many people of Northern European extraction are very sensitive to..less so for people of Mediterranean extraction. We don't have really a history across the board of good nutrition but instead..especially in the last say 3 generations..of shelf-life foods and junk foods.

We have a lot of violence to contend with which adds to emergency room costs etc. Adds to stress of life, adds to not getting outside for exercise and sunlight. Makes it harder to shop for healthy foods as grocers do not want to be in high-crime neighborhoods.

We are way way overmedicated -- if you saw the lists of what medications people are on you would faint -- at the cost to them or society and to the costs in health terms -- and now they are getting into the water supply etc. I think this mostly happened around WWII --when massive doses of some medications saved many many lives from war injuries, infectiosn etc...but we never really got the dosing down.

We are giving people very bad medical advice, particularly diabetics...they have been told for generations to eat huge amounts of carbohydrates when their bodies do not handle carbohydrates in large amounts. This leads to a lot of the heart problems that really increase medical costs.

We are religious about food and dairy products and meat etc. and instead of getting nutritional advice and information, people are given philosophies of food, which are important but separate from the nutrition of food.

We do not want to spend enough money on food, especially animal products and dairy. We need much better animal husbandry, as almost anyone would agree, and we need to shift some of the unemployed population into working with animals that feed us. There are so many animal lovers who could be working with dairy goats, rabbits, ducks etc., who would rather work at a little dairy than at a desk..

We are a sedentary population sitting under flourescent lights.

We are a stressed out population -- generations of war, fairly high unemployment in some areas, residuals from the horrors of slavery.

We have our native population in reservations and in poverty situations quite often. That does not seem to be the case in France or other places. There are very huge health problems sometimes, with alcohol being a major problem, changing from native diet to SAD (standard or substandard American diet).

We have a couple of generations of people who have perfected the art of obstacling things instead of building things and fixing things. Someone interviewed some men from the WWII generation and one thing the said about us boomers, who were younger then, was that we didn't really know how to build anything, but were good at putting up obstacles. Lots of red tape. Lots of endangered species stuff. Lots of rules for people to sort out. All of it good, but it is hard to get stuff done.

We do not let people at the ends of their lives die naturally but keep them going and this accounts for a lot of health care costs.

Multiple births -- huge medical expenses for premature births. There should be laws regulating the number of implanted embroyos..like 2 max and if someone is infertile, that is their cross to bear..and we should not be paying for ocuplets etc.

Breakdown of family. Single parent homes. More stress, less money, poor housing and food options.

Loss of family farms is probably in their somewhere.

Well, that is all for now. mg