I think the official title of Obamacare is The Affordable Health Care Act, which is a joke because health care is no more affordable now than it was before.
I never said that the government can't run anything properly, it's just that some things are best left alone. I used to believe that health care was one of those things, but I don't anymore. I think my turning point came when I found out that half the people in this country are already on some kind of government health care program. Now I believe that health care should be like police and fire protection. The government should provide some basic level of coverage to everybody and, if people want more, they should be free to voluntarily pay for it themselves.
This is why I like the Canadian system. They provide basic health care, but they don't cover everything. Canadians can buy private insurance for the other stuff, but they are not required to do so. Doctors can opt out of the system, but they can't be both in and out, it's one or the other. In the U.K. all doctors are in the program, but they are allowed to treat private patients one day a week. I can see where this might cause doctors to treat their private patients differently than their public patients, which might be why Canada chose to go a different way on that. The only criticism I have heard about the Canadian system is that people have to wait a long time to get elective procedures done. I suppose this is because they have some kind of triage program where the life threatening conditions are treated first, which is as it should be. If a Canadian doesn't want to wait, he can go to one of the private doctors and pay for it himself.
Last I heard, the delegates are required to vote in accordance with the way their state's vote came out. Just because a delegate is assigned to vote for Trump doesn't necessarily mean that he likes Trump or voted for him in the primary himself, so he may or may not be a Trump supporter. After the first ballot, he can vote for anybody he wants that is still in the running. If it's a three way race, they eliminate the bottom guy and vote on the remaining two. I don't think a delegate can jump ship and vote for somebody like Romney who wasn't ever in the race, but I could be wrong about that.
Party convention politics operates under different rules than regular election politics, and they have been known to change the rules from time to time. The reason I know this is that I was elected as a precinct delegate pledged to Ronald Reagan back in 1976. The reason I put my name on the ballot was that I had read four years previous that Reagan might have won the nomination if he had more precinct delegates pledged to him. Between 72 and 76, however, they had changed the rules so that the precinct delegates were required to vote the way their precinct voted in the primary, no matter who they were pledged to. Everybody at the precinct meeting wanted to vote for Reagan at the national convention, but we couldn't because the rules had been changed. They asked me if I wanted to go to the national convention, but I declined because the whole reason I ran for precinct delegate in the first place was to vote for Reagan. Later that year I was invited to attend the state convention in Grand Rapids, which I did, but that's a whole nother story.
When I was young, I frequently entertained the fantasy of becoming President of the United States. (Who hasn't?) By now I no longer have the energy for a job like that, or any job for that matter. My early experiences taught me that I don't have the patience for politics anyway. It's like those courtroom dramas that they used to have on TV, they just show you the interesting parts and skip over the boring crap which constitutes most of the time spent in a courtroom. (I know that because I was on a jury once.) It's the same with politics, all you see on the news are the few interesting or exciting moments in the lives of the politicians, they don't show you all the boring meetings they have to attend and all the asses they had to kiss to get where they are today. Besides, the president gets blamed for everything that goes wrong in the country, whether it's really his fault or not. Presidents do have a lot of power, but certain things like the economy and the weather are mostly beyond their control. I say "mostly" because I suspect that Obama had something to do with the last two record breaking winters we had. He said that, if elected, he would do something about global warming and, by God, he did!
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