What kind of freedom? Many would like to be free to be freelancers without having to worry so much about health insurance. How do we get there?
Otherwise, how could you explain Obama (for all the ills he committed) taking Romney's healthcare plan, and then the entirety of the Republican magically turning against the plan that they themselves generated? It's not animosity, it is certainly calculated.
I think there are a multitude of smaller problems to solve and smaller steps to take that would be utterly uncontroversial to the wider public. But they will not be considered because both sides are pushing for their big thing and locked into combative attitudes.
Same goes for immigration reform for that matter. There's plenty of low grade nonsense to clean up with legislation but the culture of controversy derails trying to find where consensus actually exists and acting on it.
A good positive example would be how criminal justice reform was actually attempted recently.
Now, the main thing is this:
>But they will not be considered because both sides are pushing for their big thing and locked into combative attitudes.
This is not true, as per what I mentioned before. Obama took a Republican healthcare plan, and it was still gridlocked and framed as extremist.
The truth is that there are real interests in this country that actively don't want problems to be fixed, and that's the reason why there is so much low grade nonsense that gives you the idea that it's because both sides are intransigent, but past experiments show that trying to collaborate with the obstructionist party just leads to the ratchet effect [0].
In effect, there can never be consensus because the purpose of some is simply obstruction and dysfunction, which is made evident by what happened to Romney's healthcare plan. The only solution is to use an electoral breakthrough, pushed by a not-so-moderate message, to create a new fait-accompli and change the political landscape, otherwise you either fall prey to the ratchet effect or to gridlock.
The same goes for people who would attempt being entrepreneurs if all they had to worry about losing was money.
The rest of the developed world has _universal_ healthcare. In many countries it is provided through single-payer, in some it is through mandatory private insurance, in others it is a mix.
Where the United States stands alone is not the lack of a universal government program, but that we have many millions of people not covered by any health insurance system at all.
No one is talking about a free lunch, they are talking about a better, more efficient way of doing it.
We are saying "it is much more efficient and fair to have single payer health care"... it is not a free lunch... it is a cheaper, healthier lunch.