The people who would be able to enact health care changes already have good health care, so they don’t see the point.
Not by most of the metrics I’d use to determine “greatness”, it isn’t. You can look up plenty of charts to see where we rate on happiness, education, illness, income inequality and social mobility, social safety nets, infant mortality,etc., and we’re nowhere near the top. Really, whenever I hear someone say we’re the greatest country on Earth, I figure that person would say the exact same thing about Iran if they’d been born there.
How is it not self evident, to a group consolidated behind cutting government spending and thrift with funds, that it’s far cheaper for the US citizenry to subsidize health care premiums, rather than pay actual health care costs, for citizens unable to get coverage?
I mean, come on, Joe American with health insurance has it BECAUSE it’s way cheaper than paying for care. His taxes are paying to cover those people without insurance in some form. How can he not recognize the savings that could be had?
Why’s it too complicated for people to understand? I find it baffling.
America likes to see itself as “the leader of the free world.” Doing things because other countries have been doing them is the action of a follower, not a leader.
Maybe in the aggregate, but a lot of that depends on how you derive your statistics. Looking at the US like a monolith vs. a gaggle of European countries and proclaiming that we suck because we don’t have the happiness value of Denmark, or the educational value of Finland, or social mobility of Germany isn’t a fair comparison.
Roll all of Europe together into one big unit, including non-EU nations like Bulgaria and Albania, and you get something more comparable to the US in terms of the diversity of economic situations and everything else.
Why should we roll all of Europe together any more than we should include Mexico in the U.S. stats? He said “greatest country”, and I’m comparing it to other countries, not some patchwork quilt of nations stuck together on one landmass. Even so, I’d say Western Europe as a whole comes out ahead in most things I mentioned.
Some things are a LOT easier to do somewhere like say… Denmark, which is roughly the size of the Houston area in population, versus the entire US. Comparing the two is absurd at best, and misleading at worst.
Compare us to nations of similar size and population (India, China, Brazil, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria) and we almost certainly come out ahead on almost everything.
Change is not an issue only in USA, many other countries have also a problem that it is hard to find a balance when world changes and when people are used to something it is easy to change their habits.
It’s only absurd if the claim being made is “America’s the best country in the world (of its size and population)”. If the claim is simply “best country in the world”, it’s fair to challenge.
I still it started with Obama asking the American people for change. The nerve of some people.
Wait… are we discussing “universal health care and America” or are we debating the OP’s rather ridiculous assertion that the lack of universal health care in America shows the country is “resistant to change”?
**”I’m not against change, I just want to make sure the change is an improvement” **
The words of my father when we were in essentially the same argument years ago.
In regards to Obama care, I think that explains it well. While you may see it as an improvement, I think may do not.
In my opinion, Americans have fewer traditions and are less bound by them than any culture in the world.
After pride comes the fall.
You’re in good company, at least. That was Winston Churchill’s attitude as the greatness of the British Empire was crumbling around him, but as he found out, clinging to the old myths doesn’t stop the world from changing.
Besides, the title of The Greatest Country On Earth™ isn’t worth shit except for bragging rights and false pride. Britain is still a strong, modern nation that has no reason at all to hang its head. It did that by changing, finally.
I think a big part of it is the fact that we are a very divided nation. We are divided by race and ethnicity (whites vs various non-whites but mostly blacks and latinos nowadays. Although in the past and in certain areas asians were targeted), divided by geography (southern vs west/northeast. Rural vs urban), divided by class (middle class vs poor).
Any attempt to use the government to improve people’s lives will be interpreted as a zero sum game. Basically you will ‘lower health care quality and raise taxes on hard working white real americans and use the money to give subsidies and higher quality health care to blacks, latinos, single mothers and lazy people’. It is divide and conquer, and it works. Middle income countries are surpassing us while we are busy patting ourselves on the back about how Jesus likes us best.
FWIW, the US wanted to pass UHC back in the 40s under FDR. They couldn’t get it passed because southern politicians realized it would mean integrated hospitals and health care for blacks.
If you go to states that do not seem to have such strong divisions (the northeastern states) they are spearheading health reform. MA & VT passed health reform before the federal government. They are now spearheading reforms that the federal gov will likely need to enact (single payer & price controls).
USA loves change, its just that with 300+million of the little buggers it takes time.
The OP has it backwards, the USA is, and has been for a long time (arguably, for the whole time it has existed as a country), almost certainly the fastest changing nation on Earth (certainly the fastest changing one of much size or global consequence).
However, too much rapid, large scale change makes a lot of people dizzy and nauseated. For this reason America also has generated perhaps the largest and most extreme conservative movement of any major nation, and even people who reject such political and social conservatism with respect to the major social and economic changes going on around them, may still be motivated to rebel against minor changes that do not seem, to them, either inevitable or very necessary, such as changing to the metric system or using dollar coins instead of bills.
I don’t think there’s an overall theme of resistance to change here.
There are special interests that are making large amounts of money of the existing health care system. They have an obvious motive for maintaining it. So they’re paying lobbyists to fight change, buy political support, and manufacture resistance.
The metric system is just a laziness issue. Nobody really wanted to change over - even the French wouldn’t have gone for it if it had been put to a vote - but most systems got dragged into it by global economics. We’re big enough to resist those economic forces longer than most other countries.
Is that why you won’t ditch the dollar bill in favour of a dollar coin? 
And that is why it has NEVER changed! Now pardon me while I go powder my wig and see what my indentured servant is up to.