The primitive hominid was amoral. Survival of the fittest. You want it, you take it, and keep it if you can. Until you can't. The primitive person has a reptilian brain; eat, rest, fight as needed, reproduce. Rinse and repeat.

The world is a dangerous place. Instead of "me" against the world, "we" band together in families, clans, tribes, and city-states for mutual aid and protection. Then it became "us" against "them." If we can successfully subdue them, we can subjugate (enslave) them for our benefit, expressed in economy and power. We perceive that as good so long as we remain amoral.

Keeping to this thumbnail sketch, morality was the product of evolution among us as individuals and society, eventually including the Golden Rule. Slavery persisted long after morality evolved because it remained an economic convenience and expression of power. The U.S. Civil War is perhaps "the" textbook example of how economic convenience is willing to subjugate culture, morality, and even the essence of humanity in order to extend itself. That is the briefest explanation I can give for the existence of slavery.

Health care is a primary issue of our time. There are many points of view, and more than one are valid. Mine goes something like this: health care is NOT a basic right, i.e., it is not listed anywhere in the Declaration of Independence or the U.S. Constitution. But like other social developments such as public schools, roads, police & fire protection, libraries, social security, medicare, etc., health care is a desirable inclusion.

The major stumbling block is that national health is not a good fit with a profit driven capitalist economy. The primary motive of the health care industry (medical personnel, pharma, insurance, etc.) is profit, not health. Health is a by-product and not the purpose of the health care industry. To wit: pharma doesn't want medicinal cures for ailments; it wants to produce drugs to treat ailments indefinitely because that is infinitely more profitable.

We can't get past the stumbling block because conservative fight tooth and nail to prevent the nation from venturing further down the path toward socialism, while liberals embrace increased social programs. I don't think there is common ground to be had. Conservatives hold that capitalism provides the best health care in the world (but only to those who can afford it) while progressive liberals now claim health care is a basic human right (tho it isn't), and regular liberals and moderates see the situation for what it is: a for profit system that dispenses health care based on wealth. Conservatives must be OK with that, given how hard they will fight to preserve it. And liberals and moderates have decided they want health care to be as common to all people as public schools, social security, and medicare.

My projected outcome: the U.S. will inexorably move toward a national health care, but it will be vastly more expensive than it is for our Canadian and European counterparts and not be as good. Because that seems to be the American way. (Going off memory here, but I think I recall the stats being that US health care costs are roughly double that of other western nations while delivering about 70 or 80% as much health care.)