Well, nobody said health care insurance/subsidy is better in the U.S. than anywhere else. In fact, there are a lot of misconceptions about what's better or worse. There's no question that the best health care, from a technological standpoint, is available here in the U.S. Whether you can afford it or not is another issue.

Lots of misguided 20-something folks here in the U.S. are aligned with the Republican party because they think the Republican party is the party of opportunity. I say that's hogwash! Sure, the Republican party will support a person's ambitions to become richer and more powerful, but only if his net worth already exceeds a billion and his annual income exceeds 1E8. If you're only a hundred-millionaire, they don't care about you and, in reality, want to tax you into oblivion.

The current White House is full of "eugenicists" whose goal it is to provide opportunity for those at the top of the economic ladder to acquire more at the expense of those who have less, because they want a distinct impoverished lower class to do their bidding while they enjoy their trillions. They're not there, yet, but that's where they want to go. If you have questions about that, just look up some of the opinions of Herbert Walker (ever heard of George Herbert Walker Bush?). We call him George the first.

I could go on, but the evidence abounds.

When my parents brought me here from Germany in the early '50's, things in Germany were pretty awful. They came here looking for opportunity. There appeared to be plenty of it, but it was hollow. While the taxes have been kept relatively low, over the past half century, shortly before my father died, he noted that all his friends and colleagues in Germany, those with whom he'd worked and even those with whom he'd apprenticed as a boy, were enjoying a substantially better quality of life than he. Their health care was secure, their pensions were secure, as workers they'd been treated better than he had, despite the fact he'd been a union member most of his life, and, most of all, they didn't have to concern themselves with the government corruption, rampant crime, and predatory business practices that abound in the U.S. The most vacation he'd ever had was three weeks, the most sick leave he'd ever had was a week, though the total amount of work he'd missed in his entire working life, was eight days, of which 6 were days in the hospital when he was in the military and had been wounded in combat.

I could go on at some length about that, too. Don't even get me started on the subject of public education here. It's disgusting, tragic, and, worse, it's no better in Europe. I typically recommend that folks send their kids to college in India, though I don't know whether that's even possible, since it's so much cheaper there, and since living costs are lower. Since that education is acceptable to so many U.S. employers, U.S. universities should suffer the competition until they stop playing the games they're playing. The public education in the lower K-12 (kindergarten through grade 12) system is totally in the toilet, as, now, teachers have nothing to teach, since their education consists almost entirely of education courses. When I was in school, my teachers had all had real jobs, as waiters, oilfield workers, soldiers, sailors, engineers, etc. Nowadays, they're unable to form a complete sentence, yet receive as much pay as technically competent engineers, lawyers, and accountants who really have learned what it is to do useful work.

Anyway, folks, it's not a bed of roses.

RE