Doug, there are many services that you undoubtedly use and take for granted which, by your lights, are socialistic. If your house catches fire, you can call your local fire department and they will come and put the fire out. No charge to you. Paid for by taxes. If someone is breaking into your house, you can call the local police department and they will send the police. No charge to you. Paid for by taxes. The street in front of your house was built and maintained through taxes. If you want to drive from Phoenix to Los Angeles and back, you can do so on interstate highways, built and paid for by taxes. One could easily build a substantial list of the things you (and all of us) use that are government mandated and administered and are paid for in part or in full by taxes.

This is often the most efficient and least expensive way of doing these things.

In fact, all of what most people would consider "essential services" are government mandated and administered and paid for by the taxpayers. You may not use some of these facilities and services that your taxes pay for. You may have never needed the fire department or the police department and you may have no reason or desire to visit Los Angeles;   but—these facilities and services are there should you need them or want to make use of them.

Good health care is an essential service. So essential that you could die without swift medical treatment. Or that you could suffer grievously for years from some condition that could by cured or at least alleviated with proper medical treatment. These desperately needed services are often denied to people unless they are willing to go so deeply into debt that they will never be able to dig themselves out. Literally, "your money or your life!"

Or they must pay an egregiously large share of their incomes—if, indeed, they have incomes, as many people in these bad economic times do not—for health insurance. And even then, you may not be covered. People on the inside of insurance companies (who have recently grown a conscience) have reported much about the obscene profits the companies are making, and how the companies' clients are often denied life saving services because the company gropes around to come up with some excuse not to pay, such as a "pre-existing condition."

This is just downright criminal. In no other modern, wealthy, industrialized, supposedly civilized country is this barbarism allowed to happen.

And people who are wealthy enough to have insurance coverage, or, as in your case, Doug, are covered by Medicare and the VA (both government run agencies, paid for by taxes) cavalierly, thoughtlessly, and selfishly object to expanding this essential service to those who are in need of it because you see it as "socialism."

For shame, Doug! Shame on all of you who are so callous that you would deny your fellow citizens this much needed program because you are so deathly afraid of "socialism," when you already benefit greatly by services that are just as "socialistic" as national health service would be in this country.

An examination of world health statistics, such thing as life expectancy and infant mortality, the United States is way behind, even behind some "third world" countries.

Reagan's "City on the Hill?" That other countries look up to as an example?

I don't think so.

Don Firth