no one can. Our economic system is established, and it's worked very well for the most part. But besides that, can you think of any democracy that has had a big change in the country's economic system without a revolution? It really can't happen.
Just the logistics of it boggles the mind. If you sit down and think about it in detail (I don't know if you work in an office with computers or do detail work or what, but if you do, you know what this process is), it would be a massive undertaking, and hugely expensive, to change just ONE of the subsystems you named to universal. Take the healthcare system...it can't really change from what it is to single payer in, say, a year or two. It would take many years and have to be done in small stages.
Imagine all the claims being filed every day with ins. cos. Those ins. cos. need to fulfill their obligations on those claims, which do not stop while you are instituting this change. Drs and hospitals are turning in invoices to the state for Medicaid treatment, so there are lots of those invoices coming in daily, and will cont. to come in daily while this change is being done. Then there's a whole Medicare system that is enormous, which would have to change. All these invoices and payments and denials coming and going every day, in the middle of a process trying to change the system. It would take probably a couple of decades, is my guess. And that's just the healthcare system.
In order to change quickly, it takes a revolution (which I do not advise!), which stops everything in the country, like a war on its soil would, which would result in millions of people suffering and dying from failure to get healthcare, or broke from failure to get ins. reimbursements. The country's economic system would collapse or almost collapse, like in other revolutions, before it can be rebuilt.
It's nice to dream about big changes, but those systems needed to be set up a certain way to begin with, in order for that to happen. The healthcare bill is an example, I think, of one way it can be done, IF that's what will be done. A first stage. Even so, that first stage is taking five or so years to implement. And that's just one stage of one program!
I like the idea of capitalism with safety net social programs for the most needy and the most vulnerable, which is what we had before it started being degraded. Get the special interests out of the way, term limits for Congress, weed out corruption to extent possible, beef up Social Security, and we're on our way to being a pretty good system, I htink.
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