An aspect of universl health care: do any of the proposals look at preventitive care as part of the policy?

Preventative health care is part of Obama's plan and i believe i saw it in Clinton's as well.

You bring up a good point the most important facet of health care is maintaining a healthy population to keep costs down. Our entire medical industry-as pdooma stated- is not designed to be like that though. Our medical and pharmaceutical industries are among the most powerful groups and they will not like large scale changing of their money train.

THIS is the main reason that a good universal health care system in this country will be extremely difficult to do. How do you convince multibillionaire industries to be beneficent and fair, altruistic and moral?

I guess the first step is to at least TRY.

This is one of my major concerns with socialized medicine. Once you give the government control of health care, what will stop them from being the deciders of who is in need and who is not. You're fat, no converge. You smoke, no coverage. What's next? You're old, no coverage. You're a lost cause, no coverage....

When you give the government the right to play God, you get what you deserve.

Try finding enough GPs to do that much preventative care. That will be problem #1. Med schools aren't putting out GPs in record numbers, they're putting out specialists. You tell future doctors what kind of doc they're allowed to be.

They do in England and the doctor's double their salary with "healthy" bonuses.

In other words, England rewards the doctors with bonuses in proportion to them keeping people healthy.

England splits the savings with the doctors.

I think that's a bit too regimented. Do you really want everyone to be the same? They tried that in Germany and Japan in the 1930's and it didn't work well for them.