Stephan:   In the United States citizens are increasingly basically cows to be milked, by the tax system, by the legal system, and nowhere is it clearer than what happens to people trapped in the illness profit system. In no other developed country do citizens go bankrupt because of healthcare.  In the U.S., as this report describes, two-thirds of personal bankruptcies are caused by interactions with this wretched system. Most Europeans, when you talk with them, express disbelief that it could be true, and are gobsmacked by the numbers. When you hear a politician say "socialized medicine," know that what they are really saying is, "I am a servant of the illness profit system which gives hundreds of thousands of dollars to my campaign. My job is to protect their profits, and I think you are too stupid to figure that out." No rational person who doesn't have some other priority can justify a system that produces such dreadfully poor health outcomes, America ranks 37th in the world according to the WHO,  yet costs two to five times more as a percentage of GDP than any other developed nation.