Universal Healthcare

I find myself discussing healthcare more and more lately. It pops up frequently when talking about AIDS issues, since making good healthcare available to everyone is such an obvious moral imperative in that context. But general political discussions are leading to it more and more, and some interesting ideas have come up.

First, I've heard several times that the drive for universal healthcare will be from corporations sick of paying ridiculous premiums. This makes some sense, if we assume that companies have their economic self interest in mind. I know a lot of you economists are scratching your heads on that one - of course they do, right? Well, look at environmental laws: corporate America has lobbied hard against these, yet has a lot to benefit from less-polluting, and therefore more efficient, processes. Getting corporations to realize what's good for them is hard, since they're run by ideological people. This prings me to the second point.

Conservatives don't like universal healthcare like they don't like welfare; they are ideologically opposed to spending on it. There is no explicit conservative argument against spending, though, because certain areas of the budget are free to grow exponentially under conservative rule. I think we need to frame the issue differently, then.

Why is defense spending OK but healthcare spending not?

We have a collective defense because:
1) there are outside threats which pose a risk to many Americans
2) we recognize the importance of defending ourselves
3) defending against these threats is absurdly expensive for one person to do alone

Those all sound like characteristics of healthcare to me.

I don't have a missile battery or tank in my backyard, but I am expected to figure out healthcare on my own. I'm not sure I see the big difference.