Reply #101: Why Germany won't work here.

[Jakes Progress]

It's in your first sentence. The German plan requires "social ethic" and "social solidarity". I could see a strictly regulated industry that had, at its core, a desire to make things work. But the US is a unbridled capitalist country. We don't successfully regulate industry. We have almost no examples to rely on. When corporations get so bad that their excesses piss everyone off, we regulate them lightly. Even those light regulations fall within a decade as our bought and paid for congress writes new rules and new laws to let their benefactors run unfettered again.

Witness what we have done with the banking laws that we passed after the last depression.

Any corporate portion of the equation will be corrupted. We have a crappy and unequal medical system because of big insurance. We can point to how Germany does it, and we can say that Canada doesn't work, but the single-payer system is still the only one that has a chance in our corporate dominated country.