Yeah, we'd better just forget about ever having Universal Health Care in America.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

12. For the forseeable future, yes you should.

Before you can think about free-at-point-of-use health care in America, you need to retake Congress.

Before you can even think about retaking Congress, you need to redraw the congressional boundaries.

Before you can redraw the congressional boundaries, you need to retake state legislatures.

And right now things are moving in the other direction.

The most the Democrats can hope for at the moment is to hold the presidency, and position themselves to retake the Senate in 2018 (or conceivably to retake it in 2016, although that seems unlikely).

The stakes at the moment are that if you win, nothing much will change, and if you lose, things will get worse. Making things significantly better isn't likely to be possible any time soon, because of the way the numbers work out.