"socialized" medicine: not as bad as cons would have you believe.

[feuervogel]

In fact, it's a hundred, a thousand, times better than the system that killed Melissa Mia Hall, who had no insurance, as a freelance writer, and began suffering chest pains due to a heart attack and died in her home because she couldn't afford to go to the doctor, let alone the hospital.

To those of you who believe the free market can and should sort everything out, this is what you're advocating. If taxation is theft, free market health cover is murder.

Do you wonder why I, as a tenuously employed person with no health benefits of my own who aspires to be a freelance writer (as all novelists are) -- a job that almost never has health benefits -- would rather move 4400 miles, a 9-hour flight, and a 6 time-zone difference to a country that mandates health coverage and provides it for those who can't afford it themselves through taxation?

Germans aren't afraid of the social contract or of helping out those in need through vile governmental muggings in dark alleys taxation. Fucking American selfishness needs to die in a fire.