I'm shocked the average person on the street believes these lies.

Universal Heathcare doesn't work in the US right now because some very powerful and rich people will be a lot less powerful and rich, and they don't want that. Open your eyes for a second and realize you are the only developed country without it, and everyone else considers it a basic human right.

I believe grecy commented on this quite well, but as someone from Canada, I hardly believe this to be true. Sure, you have 318M+ citizens, while Canada only has around 35M+ citizens. However, the United States is more wealthy than Canada, by a similar factor of ten:

US GDP 2014: 17.42 Trillion Canada GDP 2014: 1.79 Trillion

[1] http://data.worldbank.org/country/Canada [2] http://data.worldbank.org/country/United-States

To say it wouldn't work at scale is a gross exaggeration. I would argue that you shouldn't just assume that healthcare wouldn't work. If most of the money wasn't appropriated between Big Business (TM) and the Military Industrial Complex, I'm sure it would hardly be an issue to introduce Canadian-style healthcare at a country-wide scale.

I'd argue that at that scale, if you can make a system work for 80 million people, you can probably make it work for 300.

So, set some very basic standards at the federal level and make the details and implementation a state responsibility. The largest US state is significantly smaller than the largest European country that provides universal healthcare, so that should solve that problem more than completely.

Now consider how much cheaper healthcare would be without health insurance companies.

If you get the health service you have now, but without the insurance companies taking their cut, there's no reason it can't be cheaper than what you have now.

I was surprised when I learned that ObamaCare still included insurance companies in the loop, but I see now that it was a concession to get some political support behind universal healthcare, a stepping stone towards the healthcare system that Sanders is promoting.

I don't know of a single country that regrets having a universal public healthcare system. Perhaps there's a good reason that they're so popular, a reason that goes beyond the pure economics of paying for treatment.

When you're ill you want to focus on getting better, you don't want to focus on the financial burden you're placing on your family by being ill. It seems obvious for someone who's had it all their life, but perhaps it's one of those things you have to experience the difference to really understand what you're missing out on (or conversely how lucky you are).

My only experience of the other side was when I ended up getting pneumonia on a trip to NYC. Whilst there were elements of the care that were good, and I had travel insurance which covered most of the initial cost, I can say for certain that dealing with the financial side of the treatment was not something I particularly wanted to think about in my weakened state. It put me off wanting to live there, I feel sorry for those who have to put up with it year in year out.