We can't afford it. Some people like Michael Moore say that we should just divert funding for the war toward Socialized Medicine, but the fact of the matter is is that we can't afford the war either. We are already borrowing money to finance a lot of the dumb programs already in place. Government spending is out of control, and we need to exercise budget restraint now, not consider new areas to increase spending.
You know, #81, it just occurred to me to notice that the previous assertion of "don't want to pay the hospital bills for ghetto wars" was not true. I don't know why I missed it before. We pay for ghetto shootings NOW. Shots fired and people down in an American ghetto almost always results in the appearance of an ambulance.
That realization brings me back to what I've said before about American healthcare: generally, we have a dishonest and underhanded form of socialized medicine. This form is exercised in the emergency room at every hospital in the US. With rare exceptions, those admitted with life-threatening wounds are treated, regardless of their ability to pay. Eventually these stranded costs are passed onto other patients in the form of higher charges, or onto the taxpayer via government programs and tax-based adjustments. If pursued for the costs of their care, the poor can just ignore the charges, and if better off they can just bankrupt (since care costs are so huge, they easily qualify the bankruptcy).
I know a man personally who ran up those kinds of bills. That $180K worth of care was not paid by him; not dime one. So, who paid it? The state paid it, and hospital tax write-offs placed the further burden on state and national taxpayers.
Of course, there are many ways of adapting within such a system. An emergency room is a great place to kill a nigger without being held responsible for it. Just understaff, undertrain, overqualify ("just fill out these forms while we've stopped the bleeding for now"), and underequip. A larger fraction of incoming patients will die on the table.