[handrous]

It's ignored because it hardly seems relevant. Is providing healthcare to ~80m people (France, Germany—numbers off the top of my head but I think that's close for both) or, what, 150m or so (Japan, again, IIRC) really that different from 350m? What part of the difference in scale makes it impossible for the country of 350m with a higher GDP-per-capita than those other examples? Some parts of our country are sparsely populated, yes, but it's not like passing that off to a mix of highly-funded public ventures and market forces (i.e. our current very, very expensive system) magically solves that problem, so how's that relevant to preventing us from having universal healthcare? Plus, Canada's got that problem nearly as bad as we do, no? I know most of the population's down near the border, but you've got the same issues with large areas that are still lightly populated, but you manage. So that can't be the reason.