[rbanffy]

> "Universal health care" is a phrase that basically means "everyone is on medicare" by now and to a right-wing listener is synonymous with losing control of your health care decisions.

I live in a country where there is universal healthcare and I still am in full control of my healthcare decisions - I can still see a private specialist, and I have private insurance on top of the public service precisely for things like that - and to have a private room in the hospital. This also causes the private insurance to be very cheap, because the risk it deals with is much smaller.

I too miss honest debate, and news focused on providing reliable information instead of just blindly listening to anyone who wants to have a platform.

[stonogo]

This is why I put "to a right-wing listener." It doesn't matter what happens in your country. In the US, for decades, Medicare has been known as a miserable nightmare of cost-driven inefficiency and denied service. Nobody is afraid of the system you describe; they're afraid that all health care will be worst-case, and they're not willing to risk worst-case in the pursuit of universal healthcare.

This is a good example of why we no longer have that honest debate. Words that one side uses to describe their goals get sabotaged by the other side to mean the worst possible interpretation of the results of the policy. So, in one direction, "universal health care" gets heard as "worst-case Soviet doctor hell" and in the other direction "freedom of speech" gets heard as "permission to promote literal Nazis." As long as twisting the language remains profitable, we'll never get past this.

[rbanffy]

> In the US, for decades, Medicare has been known as a miserable nightmare of cost-driven inefficiency and denied service.

The reasons for that are many, and all of those are completely artificial - there are almost no political incentives to make it work well (and compete with private healthcare), and plenty of incentives to make it not work at all (because private healthcare donates a lot to politicians).

> and in the other direction "freedom of speech" gets heard as "permission to promote literal Nazis."

That's one feature of absolute freedom of speech - and that makes the freedom of speech a complicated issue with a lot of grey in the middle. OTOH, agencies such as the FCC and the FDA exist that could be a model for one that prevents the soviet-doctor-hell scenario.