Though there seem to be enough car dealers and rent-to-own furniture places,etc that boast about "No credit? Not an issue!" around that it's not impossible to live with bad credit, just harder is all.
You can live with lousy credit, but you're going to pay through the nose on interest. A bad credit score can cost you the chance to buy a better house or rent a nicer apartment. It can force you to buy things either on a cash-only basis, too, because no one will loan you money. Which also cuts into your opportunities to have credit cards with reasonable interest rates, reduces your chance to carry a Visa or Mastercard debit card from your financial institution (which deducts the purchase from your checking or savings account but is presented at the point of sale like a credit card), and might even cost you the opportunity to either be promoted in your current job or get hired to a better job. Employers don't want people who don't pay their bills to be responsible for important business decisions.
So pay your medical bills, people!
Kidding. Like Paul already said, this is a complicated issue with no single clear-cut simple answer. But I'm not convinced that the Federal government can run the system any better. New Jersey's successes shouldn't be used as fuel for Federal control because their system won't scale up to a national level, if for no other reason than the sheer size of such a system. And any system put in place will grow like mold in a flooded basement because that's what government agencies do.
Some cynic once said that the function of government is to perpetuate itself, and that's what I see nearly every government agency on any level doing. The people in the agency start out wanting to do their jobs, and because they're charged with carrying out this responsibility, they do it. Then some genius figures out that by adding this task or that process, they can get more money the next budget year, and their jobs will be that much safer from being eliminated. Before long, the sincere and hard-working and honest are displaced and overwhelmed by the opportunists because the oversight functions and agencies react so slowly. Before long, this bright new agency which began with so promising a future becomes bogged down in red tape and attention to process replace attention to people.
Do you doubt me? Look what happened in Louisiana and Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina, how slowly the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) reacted to the crisis. It wasn't President Bush's fault that the agency couldn't get their collective butts off their cushioned chairs, it was the institutional inertia and reluctance to actually make a controversial decision which cause so much trouble. And that's the fate of nearly every government agency ever introduced in the United States.
I'm concerned that a federal health care system would very quickly become a deeper morass than the current system, bent and damaged as it is.
