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> We have a very "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" and anything that costs one person money to help another is a non-starter. And yet there seems to be actual political risk and difficulty to simply repealing the ACA in its entirety without a replacement... because as bad as the ACA is in practice, in theory many Americans want it, or something like it, and do not in fact want healthcare to be left entirely to the free market. The attitude and outlook you describe certainly exists, but don't conflate the ideology of a single political party to the status of general American culture. We're not all libertarian minarchists and cowboys. And for such an "individualistic" society, we sure do have a lot of socialism already, such as food stamps, school lunches (hell, public schools themselves) federal student loans, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, the GI bill, farm subsidies, public libraries, etc. I don't think it's as unlikely as you do. The system is starting to fail for a lot of people. We've already seen the regressive populist shift, in response, and a progressive socialist shift is inevitable. Trump won but don't discount how popular Bernie Sanders actually was. |