Imagine you slip into a coma in 1995 and wake up a decade later. After getting over the initial shock of the country having gone straight to heck, you start settling in. Let's pretend that once you've thrown out your outdated wardrobe and gotten your life in order, there's still one thing you haven't updated yet: Your trusty old VCR.
You notice that everyone around you is getting DVD players now. You ask them why they dumped their VHS for DVD players. They explain about the superior image quality and how it doesn't degrade over time and so forth. You're faced with two alternatives..
The first alternative, would be to try it out, conclude that "Yes, you're right" and prepare to make the switch - in which case you'd also have to figure out if you want to keep the VCR and have both, and so foth. That'd pretty much be the ordinary thing to do.
The second alternative, reserved for those generally regarded as idiots, is to conclude that everyone else is wrong. Even though all the DVD users used to own VCRs themselves, you decide that you know something they all don't. The reason why you're sticking with VHS isn't because you're averse to change - it's because you're smarter than them. You don't even need to try it out yourself. You just know.
If you haven't seen where I'm going with this, the second alternative is what the USA has been doing as far as Universal Health Care is concerned, as contrasted to the rest of the Industrialized World. Only that our coma has lasted about 60 years.
So what does our second-alternative fool do? Well, as I said - he's not willing to actually try it out. Doing so would almost in itself be conceding defeat - Few buyers of DVD players ever went back - and no countries (I know of) with Universal Health Care ever went back. It doesn't seem that he can win an informed debate, so he chooses to remain ignorant. So he decides to just sit back and think. To simply invent whatever arguments he can that sound plausible - whether or not they actually happen to have any validity in practice.
Throw it and see if it sticks..
To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, "Making s--t up is the last refuge of the ignorant". So we get the usual familiar barrage of ridiculous arguments:
Public health care costs too much!
We spend almost twice as much on health-care than any other nation, and don't get better care.
I have health care. I don't want to pay for someone else's!
You already are. Just because it's hidden away in labor costs doesn't mean it's not there.
I'm young and healthy! I don't need it!
Your house isn't on fire at the moment, but you still pay for the fire department don't you? Most likely your house will never burn down. But you will need health-care sooner or later. That's a guarantee.
I don't want politicians getting in between me and my doctor!
As opposed to insurance company bureaucrats? Who, by the way, are accountable to their shareholders - not you.
I don't want rationed health-care, like in Canada!
By 'rationed' you actually talking about scheduling some treatment and surgery after the degree of medical emergency. That's not rationing, that's triage.
Of course, just about every country has a private option - even 'socialist' Sweden. If you're prepared to pay a bit more, you can have your non-vital surgery any time you want. Which is the system we already have.
Take heed!
And they go on and on; insisting that everyone else is wrong, even though all these arguments were raised, tested, and failed in just about every other country with Universal Health Care. After all, it's not as if these health care systems sprung up out of a vacuum like virtual quantum particles. There was debate and discussion in every country. And Universal Health Care won - and nobody looked back since. I think we'd do well to learn from everyone else.
The Republicans and 'centrist' Democrats try to float the idea that NGOs and charities could substitute a public system. Well, 60 years ago, Nye Bevan, UK Labour politician and architect of the National Health Service countered that very argument, saying "private charity is no substitute for organized justice"*
The AMA has rejected the public option. Continuing the historic analogy, what did the British Medical Association think in 1948?
Yet you'll find today that the BMA is now a fairly strong supporter of the NHS, whose existence is not threatened - even Thatcher's best efforts couldn't dismantle it. Nor could Bush dismantle Social Security in the US.
This, I believe is the true reason for Republican opposition. There's simply no going back on this; it's not happened anywhere. And for those of us who are proponents: It's a historic inevitability, and now is our time. Stand with us, or be on the wrong side of history - and end up looking like an idiot clinging to his VHS collection.
* I believe he was paraphrasing Saint Augustine's "Charity is no substitute for justice withheld." - Which tends to come in handy when trying to convert Catholics into Cristian Socialists. :)