I find it very hard to hear posters comparing the steps the US president is taking as a good example of what should happen here. You are only seeing the visible agendas, like immigration, Mexican walls, etc.
It is very easy to sit here all comfy and secure with the NHS whilst the US has a very expensive for-profit fee per service health care system. Just dealing with a fee for service system is a freakin' nightmare I am glad to be out of. I remember the phone calls, the double-checking of pages and pages of a hospital bill for my husband's gall-bladder op (not even overnight!). It cost $20,000 in 1999 for it. We had bought an expats US style healthcare plan via Norwich Union at the time and after his operation, they TRIPLED his premiums, that was £400 a MONTH we could no longer pay and returned to the UK. I am so grateful for the NHS...words don't even come close to the care we have had.
For many Americans the Affordable Health Care Act is to be axed with no substitution in the works. Another chop-em-off-at-the-knees act that this dictator will likely announce soon.
That means no more healthcare coverage for millions of workers whose jobs will now not have to provide any insurance. Or if they do, it will revert as to being unaffordable, so people will opt out. Right now the country's population has the lowest uninsured rate ever. That's about 9%. Before Obamacare it was 14.5%.
In the US if you have a catastrophic illness in your family and have healthcare as it is now, like cancer, you must use up ALL of your assets to pay any overages above and beyond your health care coverage. That includes letting the hospital/doctors put a lien against YOUR HOME's equity. If you have then run out of assets, you are then eligible for Medicaid coverage. Your use of it is very limited as doctors and hospitals considered it 'poor people's' coverage, so these patients are considered more 'expendable'... as they don't have jobs to get back to. My late friend with bone cancer was consistently shoved to the back of the queue for chemo. The link below offers advice on how to cope when you cannot pay your medical bills and the debt collectors come calling.
www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-alderman/what-happens-when-you-can_1_b_1702356.html
*****************************
Your neighbours can own as many guns as they wish. Even close friends may not keep their guns locked up or out of reach of children. I did not have any little ones when living in the US, but a co-worker routinely had to remind her neighbour to put her gun out of reach whenever her child went over for an agreed play-date with the neighbour's. Children are curious.
www.ibtimes.com/accidental-gun-deaths-involving-children-are-major-problem-us-2250568
"By the end of 2015, about 265 children under 18 picked up a firearm and shot someone by accident, and 83 of those shootings were fatal, according to research compiled by the gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety. Some 41 of those deaths involved the shooters themselves, and most of the shootings involved toddlers or teens who were playing recklessly with the guns."
