I don't get all this stuff about healthcare "mandates" and "signups" and "penalties"

[StefanX]

Correct me if I'm way off the mark here, but...

I thought in most countries Europe if you got sick you just went to the clinic and if you could manage to show proof of address or something that showed you were citizen, the doctor would see you. (Maybe not in Germany, but I think in France and England you can basically put off dealing with the system until you show up sick.)

It's just a public facility like a library or a gymnasium which is paid for by taxes, and you show up when you feel the need to avail yourself of its services.

War comes out of taxes doesn't? Correct me if I'm wrong, but... there wasn't any kind of "mandate" where we had to "sign up" to pay our share of the $1-2 trillion to pay for the Iraq War, or face a "penalty", was there? Ahmed Chalabi and Judy Miller and Condi Rice and Colin Powell and GWB and FourthBranch and all the other Very Serious People in DC told us about the WMDs and the mushroom cloud and the aluminum tubes and the chemical trailers and all, and they read the NIE with the 16 words and Congress came up with the money by passing a spending appropriation bill or whatever, which came out of taxes.

Seriously though, why the separate funding conduit for healthcare? Why do wars get funded automatically by everyone all at once, whereas healthcare has to be this à la carte sign-up thing with individual mandates and penalties?

The whole healthcare funding debate already strikes me as so utterly derailed and debased and defrauded from the very outset, just like almost every other aspect of this inane American political discourse. People of bad faith poison the discussion by corrupting the very terminology, and from then we go merrily down the garden path talking about irrelevant abstractions, and then we get screwed. It's the American way, and I'm getting really tired of this nonsense.

Figure out how much the damn thing is going to cost, and raise taxes for it, just like you do for all the wars. End of story.