If your purse is snatched or your home broken into, you should pay for the police to come and do an investigation. Why should my tax dollars help you? I worked hard so I could buy a house in a good neighborhood. If you don’t want to pay out of pocket for police protection, you can buy your own police insurance, or work hard like me and get a job that comes with police insurance.

Same thing for your kids’ school. Get a job with education insurance, buy your own, or pay for your kids’ darn school. They’re your kids, not mine.

I shouldn’t have to pay for them to learn how to read and write and count. Keep that socialized police protection away from me. If I wanted commie kindergarten, I’d move to Venezuela!

That first paragraphs are pretty insane, huh? Police protection and childhood education are basic public goods that are rightfully paid for by our collective tax dollars. Yet this imaginary privatized public safety and educational system is exactly what the United States has for healthcare.

Instead of just, ya know, having everyone’s collective taxes pay for doctor visits and medications and surgeries, we’ve created a byzantine system where those lucky enough to have the right jobs get it paid for, but only partially, by their employers. Meanwhile, others are left to pay out of pocket.

And before former President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, a person couldn’t even purchase health insurance out of pocket if he were deemed too sickly. Thankfully, ObamaCare has expanded healthcare access to millions more.

But it’s only step one, and the United States still remains the only advanced nation without some form of universal healthcare.

Of course, Canada and Western Europe are far from perfect. Canada has historically treated its indigenous persons horribly. The U.K. voted for Brexit because racist white people in the countryside were scared of diversity in London.

Spain’s far right Vox party, which does Nazi salutes at deceased dictator Francisco Franco’s grave and shouts the slogans “Make Spain Great Again” and “Drain the Swamp,” jumped from 24 to 52 parliamentary seats in the most recent election. And in 2017, Marine Le Pen, leader of the radical anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant National Front party, came in second for the French presidency. But at least these nations all provide their people with healthcare.

Sean Pidgeon

Morristown