I can't see how that post of yours at 24 Mar 10 - 01:25 AM , Doug, relates to the last post I made, which was about how the value of clinical tests shouldn't be seen primarily in terms of financial savings but rather in terms of whether they save people's lives.

Maybe you were referring to a previous post of mine.

So far as not letting governments tell you what to do, they do it all the time, in line with the promises politicians made when standing for election, or at least that is how it's supposed to work. You have taxes and laws and police and armies, and my impression is that in fact you may well have a lot more regulations about all kinds of things than we do here.

When it comes to health care, already people eligible for Medicare can't opt out it, as I understand it, though of course they can always choose to use non-medicare health providers, just as we can use private health rather than the NHS if we wish to and it suits us better. Having equivalent cover for younger people as well doesn't involve a change of principle.

I believe at one time fire brigades operated on a private insurance model - if you weren't insured they let your house burn down. One problem was that it meant that other peoples houses got burned down too. Hence what I suppose you might call the socialist model of public fire brigades, which operates in both our countries - including a lot of volunteer input as well in some parts. I suppose you could call that aspect anarchist...

As for "If we were so bad, there wouldn't be so many risking their lives to sneak into our country" all countries are a mix of bad and good, and immigrants, legal or illegal, balance such things out, taking the bad with the good. After all there were plenty of people who were keen to go to live in the USA in the days of slavery, or later during the Jim Crow years.