It’s not a bizarre point at all. And are you really serious, that you haven’t seen all the posts insisting that plenty of other countries have done this?
It’s pretty clear that Shodan and I occupy different sectors of the political spectrum. And I haven’t heard him weigh in on what I am proposing: we could probably have a good debate about that. But we agree on the point that we can’t just say “all these other countries have spent decades getting to this point while we have been doing something completely different (and pretty stupid IMO), so now we can just turn on a dime and make our system exactly like theirs”.
Think about an area where the U.S. is actually the envy of the world: our postsecondary universities, especially the major research institutions. Do you think Indonesia, or Brazil, or whatever country you want to name, can just decide “okay, we want to have the same thing” and just instantly create it? The many decades of development weren’t really important—you can play “catch up” whenever you want? No.
It would be the Democratic Party, because I am a Democrat. And I already stated it several times upthread: I would push for a universal HDHP/HSA entitlement. People could get supplementary plans from their employers, or buy them themselves. But at the very least, you’d have something that would pay for preventative care and, in the case of a serious injury or illness, would limit your own financial liability to something manageable. If you rack up some medical debt that way, you could pay it off over time via an income-based repayment plan, similar to how direct federal student loans are handled.
Ideally I’d also like to end the tax exemption for health plans, but that’s probably not feasible due to the power of the top 20 percent, as I also noted upthread.