I think for a whole lot of people out there, it’s a combination of being relatively content with their current situation AND the potential that any proposed changes may upset their applecart for the worse.
Look at it this way- if you’re a couple in your late 50s, and you have your retirement plans all straightened out, and all of a sudden the government starts proposing changes that may increase your tax burden or change your investment plans, or health coverage or whatever, that stuff is very scary to you, even if that change may end up being beneficial overall.
That’s a lot of what happens with the universal health care concept; seniors and pre-seniors see it as something that may do a few things that are negative:
- Prevent them from seeing their own doctors, and/or force them to go to impersonal clinics.
- Increase already long wait times
- Prevent them from getting treatment they’re willing to pay for.
- Cost more money than they already pay for less (or that’s how it’s perceived).
Considering that those groups I mentioned are among the very most politically active, they hold a lot of sway.
There’s also a difference in fundamental tradition and outlook between the US and many other countries; in Europe, the working class and middle class tended to be allied against the nobility in most of the revolutions and social upheavals. I gather that there’s not nearly so much middle/working class friction as there is in the US.
In the US, the middle-class has traditionally been the largest single group, and there’s always been middle/working class friction, as the middle class doesn’t want to be lumped in with them, and consider the working class and poor as being people who didn’t plan or make the correct decisions and are in that group as a consequence.
Most proposals for social change tend to be perceived as taxing the middle and upper classes in order to provide the working class and poor some sort of benefit or service. In the case of healthcare, most middle class families have it taken care of more or less, and see universal healthcare as being a way to soak them for more money to throw at those who didn’t plan or make correct decisions. When looked at in that light, it’s easier to see why people would be much more resistant to change in terms of the healthcare system, especially considering that nameless people who live somewhere else hardly ping most people’s empathy meters.
Nobody gives a shit about the metric system anyway; for things where metric really provides an advantage, it’s already been metric-ified, and for the rest, like cans of beer, deli meat, etc… it just doesn’t matter whether I get a 12 oz can of beer or 355 ml of beer, or 1/4 lb of pastrami versus 113 grams of pastrami. So why change?